ALLIANCE OPHTHALMOLOGY, PLLC et al v. ECL GROUP, LLC

On April 15, 2022, Alliance Ophthalmology, PLLC, Dallas Retina Center, PLLC, and Texas Eye and Cataract, PLLC (“Plaintiffs”), individually and on behalf a class of those similarly situated, represented by Thomas R. Ferguson, III of Womble Bond Dickinson (US), LLP, filed a class action contract lawsuit against ECL Group, LLC (“Defendant”), seeking specific performance, along with prejudgment and post-judgment interest for the alleged breach of contract. This case was filed in the U.S. District Court in the Middle District of North Carolina.

In the complaint, the plaintiffs stated, “It is essential to physicians’ practices to know the medical and diagnostic history of every patient the physician treats, not to mention the patient’s test results, scans, and other key data critical to the delivery of efficient patient care. However, because physicians are rightly focused on delivering such treatment and care, they often rely on external vendors to provide these record-keeping and related practice management support services.”

The complaint went on to say, “Plaintiffs, like thousands of other practices, contracted with Defendant ECL, who advertises and offers such services to assist physicians, such as billing, patient record keeping, and associated practice management support. Plaintiffs relied on ECL to keep their patient records and data and to bill for patient visits, among other administrative tasks.”

The plaintiffs alleged, “ECL suffered an outage as a result of a ransomware attack—a fact it concealed from its clients for weeks. Instead of working diligently to restore service, keeping its clients apprised of such efforts, and mitigating any damages, ECL did the opposite  . . ECL misrepresented to its clients what truly happened, continually promised service would be restored when it was not (to encourage physicians not to move to new service providers), and invoiced its clients for services that were never provided.”

The plaintiffs  also alleged, “Many of those services remain unavailable months after the outage first occurred. When Plaintiffs expressed to ECL the crippling effect the outage had on their practices and the damages consequently incurred—and that Plaintiffs continue to incur—they were met with silence or misrepresentations. To make matters worse, Plaintiffs continued to endure service outages and were met with further misrepresentations by ECL.”

The plaintiffs also alleged that “the attack was by a former ECL employee. After this employee stopped working for ECL, ECL failed to prohibit the employee from accessing ECL’s systems. Thus, ECL’s own former employee accessed its systems and wreaked havoc using the employee’s prior credentials. This was not a sophisticated cyberattack; it was gross negligence . . . By failing to maintain the security of Plaintiffs’ data and access and functionality of the EMR software, as outlined herein, ECL breached the contracts.”

There are six claims of relief presented by the plaintiffs. The first, second, third and fourth claims the plaintiff brought are for alleged breach of contract. The fifth claim is for alleged fraud, and the sixth claim is for alleged unfair and deceptive trade practices.

In the prayer for relief, the plaintiffs requested specific performance and damages in an amount of at least $75,000, trebled, and prejudgment and post-judgment interest, as well as reasonable costs of attorneys’ fees, costs of the action, and any other relief the court deems just and proper.

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