Medical center fighting prosecutors in hep-C case

The Audubon Ambulatory Surgical Center in Colorado Springs is fighting a subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s Office seeking the identity of a patient who may have contracted hepatitis C from a fired operating room technician.

In a motion filed in U.S. District Court in Denver on Tuesday, Audubon’s lawyers want to quash a subpoena that also seeks the records of all patients treated between May 4 and July 1, when Kristen Diane Parker worked at the center.

Prosecutors say they need the information in their case against Parker, to whom state health officials have linked 27 cases of hepatitis C contracted by former patients at Rose Medical Center in Denver and Audubon.

Parker, who was fired from Rose before working at Audubon, told Denver police that she swapped dirty needles for syringes filled with fentanyl, a powerful painkiller.

She is scheduled to go on trial Monday.

According to Audubon, only two patients tested positive for the same genome type of the disease as Parker contracted. One of those two patients reported she contracted the disease from a blood transfusion in 1972.

That leaves just one case, which Audubon officials have identified only as “Patient B.”

Audubon has supplied the U.S. Attorney’s Office with his medical reports but have redacted his identity.

Patient B has told Audubon that he objects to their releasing his information to prosecutors.

Audubon lawyer Lori M. Moore said Patient B told them he would agree to allow the hospital to identify him if genome-sequencing tests by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definitively link his disease to Parker.

Without his consent, Audubon officials say, they are required by federal privacy laws to withhold that information.

In response, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has narrowed its request to just the unredacted medical records for Patient B, not all the patients in the May-July time period, citing previous cases where court orders allowed the release of such information.

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For more court coverage, go to ‘The Sidebar’ blog at gazette.com.