Dive Brief:
- An openly gay man has filed a lawsuit against Dr. Elaine Jones, the Torrance Health Association Inc. and the related Torrance Memorial Physician Network, alleging that the defendants inflicted emotional distress and libeled him when they labeled his homosexuality a chronic condition.
- Dr. Jones coded the homosexual diagnosis as 302.0, a code which was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973. Plaintiff Matthew Moore, 46, says that he asked for the code to be removed but a year later, he alleges, the code remained on his chart.
- Torrance Memorial, for its part, says that it "does not view homosexuality as a disease or chronic condition." Its leadership contends that the code had been used as a result of "human error" related to the complexities of its EMR, and that when the patient requested the record be corrected it was in fact removed.
Dive Insight:
According to Shane Snowdon, who heads the health and aging program for the LGBT rights group the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, Moore's case is actually not unusual, and that "ignorance and bias" are common among health professionals. Snowdon argues that this incident emphasizes the need for ongoing efforts to educate healthcare providers about knowledgeable, respectful treatment of LGBT Americans.
Torrance Memorial, meanwhile, continues to contend that the problem doesn't involve prejudice towards homosexuality but rather that the error resulted from "the highly complex software using creating electronic medical record." Perhaps, but Moore alleges that when he confronted Dr. Jones, she told him that the medical community had not reached a consensus as to whether homosexuality was a disease. It also seems unlikely that a code that has not been regularly in use since 1973 popped up accidentally. The court will have to decide.