Forget ambulance chasing, personal injury law firms are now waiting for you at the hospital 

Geo-fencing has been deployed by retailers for years. Bringing it into health care spaces, however, is raising alarm among privacy experts.

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Personal injury law firms in the Philadelphia area are sending patients in ERs, chiropractors and pain clinics targeted ads that some privacy experts and prosecutors say are intrusive, and possible, illegal. (ShutterStock)

Personal injury law firms in the Philadelphia area are sending patients in ERs, chiropractors and pain clinics targeted ads that some privacy experts and prosecutors say are intrusive, and possible, illegal. (ShutterStock)

Personal injury lawyers have long chased ambulances. But now, they’re waiting for ambulances to come to them, staking out emergency rooms in pursuit of clients.

At least digitally.

Patients sitting in emergency rooms, chiropractors, and pain clinics in the Philadelphia area may start noticing the kind of messages typically seen along highway billboards and public transit on their phones: personal injury law firms looking for business by casting mobile ads at patients.

The potentially creepy part? You’re only getting fed the ad because somebody knows you’re in an emergency room.

The technology behind the ads, known as geo-fencing, or placing a digital perimeter around a specific location, has been deployed by retailers for years to offer coupons and special offers to customers as they shop. Bringing it into health care spaces, however, is raising alarm among privacy experts.

“It’s really, I think, the closest thing an attorney can do to putting a digital kiosk inside of an emergency room,” said digital marketer Bill Kakis, who runs the Long Island-based firm Tell All Digital. Kakis says he recently inked deals with personal injury law firms in the Philadelphia area to target patients.

Other law firms and marketing companies around the country are also testing out the technology in hospital settings.

“Is everybody in an emergency room going to need an attorney? Absolutely not,” Kakis said. “But people that are going to need a personal injury attorney are more than likely at some point going to end up in an emergency room.”

The advertisers identify someone’s location by grabbing what is known as “phone ID” from WiFi, cell data, or an app using GPS.

Once someone crosses the digital fence, Kakis says, the ads can show up for more than a month — and on multiple devices.

To Kakis, this is just modern-day target marketing. In his pitch to potential clients, in an email reviewed by WHYY, he calls the technology “totally legit.”

But Attorney General of Massachusetts Maura Healey offers a different response.

“Private medical information should not be exploited in this way,” Healey said in an interview. “Especially when it’s gathered secretly without a consumer’s knowledge, without knowledge or consent.”

Healey’s office was the first in the country to go after geo-fencing technology catching people while they are seeking care.

Prosecutors there reached a deal last year with a Massachusetts-based digital advertising firm that was sending people who entered Planned Parenthood clinics advertisements from a Christian pregnancy counseling and adoption agency. When patients would go to the clinics, they’d also cross a digital fence and soon get advertisements that read things like “You have choices,” and click here for pregnancy help.

Healey’s deal claiming violations of the state’s consumer protection act for the ads being allegedly “unfair and deceptive” banned the digital firm from Massachusetts.

Although Pennsylvania law provides similar protections to consumers, prosecutors in the state’s attorney general’s office would not say whether they are looking into the rise of similar tactics in the Philadelphia area. Still, Healey said directing ads at people for seeking medical care is really a kind of digital harassment.

“We just want to make sure that companies aren’t exploiting information in violating of existing privacy laws with respect to health information that’s so sensitive,” she said.

Most consumers realize that their phones are basically a tracking device, says Bill McGeveran, who teaches internet and technology law at the University of Minnesota. It is one thing to feel targeted in a grocery store, he said, but it feels far more intrusive when it creeps into other parts of daily life.

“I think information about health, sexuality, finances, political views, people feel really differently about than they do about the brand of toothpaste they prefer,” McGeveran said. “And a higher level of sensitivity makes sense with this kind of sensitive information.”

Perhaps a bit alarming, but is it illegal? McGeveran said not necessarily, at least not right now. The heath privacy law known as HIPAA, for instance, would not apply to these location-based mobile ads.

“It applies to hospitals and clinics and doctors and insurance companies, not to the lawyers and the marketers working on their behalf,” he said. “HIPAA is targeted only to certain particular actors in the health care industry, so there’s lots of digital marketing and record-keeping that’s outside of HIPAA.”

McGeveran said prosecutors can try novel uses of state consumers protection laws, like Healey did. But it is so far unclear how those claims would hold up on appeal.

Another possibility is the Federal Trade Commission cracking down if information is being shared in a sneaky way. The FTC once settled with a flashlight app that was deceptively sharing consumers’ locations with advertisers. But federal regulators have been slow to combat phone tracking in hospitals, McGevran said.

Kakis, the advertiser, did not want to reveal which personal injury law firms have signed on and which hospitals are affected. He will say, though, that the geo-targeted health-care space campaigns are one of the fastest-growing parts of his business.

“Within a few weeks, we pretty much had every hospital taken up in the downstate New York area,” he said.

Several personal injury law firms in Philadelphia contacted for comment never returned calls and emails seeking comments about advertising strategies.

Talking to people coming in and out of emergency rooms, one thing becomes clear fast: some see these kind of targeted ads as preying on people when they are the most vulnerable.

Take Joe Finnegan, 40, of Northeast Philadelphia. He was recently leaving a hospital in Center City for an appointment he said he does not was shared with anyone.

“It’s supposed to be your privacy as a patient,” Finnegan said.

Seeing law firm ads tied to his recent hospital visit, he said, would be enraging, since he had no idea he was crossing into the geo-targeted zone.

“I mean, you can’t just put a physical fence up, why would you be able to put a cyber fence up? I don’t get it,” he said.

Meanwhile, Kakis, in his initial talks with law firms looking for clients, he says he’s used this pitch before: What’s your target demographic for injured people? There isn’t one. Because everybody gets injured, he says.

But the ads that go along with that pitch make Finnegan wonder:

“If they’re tracking every move in that regard, what else are they watching?”

Sometimes, it just depends which side of the fence you’re on.

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