Urologist sued over mixed patient files

A federal class action lawsuit has been filed against a pediatric urologist in Michigan.

The suit alleges that Dr. Bryan Sack kept hundreds of private images of minor patients in the same personal Dropbox account as hundreds of files containing child pornography. The legal filing names at least 13 potential victims. It seeks to determine if the patient photos were shared with others. It also asks why the images were not stored in a secure medical system.

Investigators identified nearly 28,000 files in Sack's personal cloud account. This total includes nearly 1,300 files of child pornography that he allegedly downloaded from the internet. The remaining files include medical photos and videos. These medical files depict close-up images of children's genitals. All these items were saved in the same account. This arrangement violated the hospital's policy on patient data storage.

David Champine, an attorney with Flood Law, represented the plaintiffs. Champine spent much of his career prosecuting child and sexual abuse cases. He said investigators found genital photos of pubescent children in the same folders as the downloaded material. "Ultimately when they get into the Dropbox account, they discover not only is there known child sexually abusive material downloaded from the internet in this storage account, but there's also genital photos of minor, minor pubescent children being stored in the same folders, same Dropbox account," Champine said.

The lawsuit details reports from parents who saw Sack using his phone during exams. One parent described an instance where Sack asked to take multiple photos of an infant's genitals. He said this was necessary to move forward with a procedure. Another parent saw Sack use the flashlight function on his phone during an examination. Champine noted that parents do not know if a photograph was taken in that specific instance.

Champine also alleged that Sack offered to help a child provide a urine sample in a bathroom. The child's father stopped the doctor from doing so. The attorney stated that these actions went against hospital policy. "The doctor had offered to go into the bathroom with the kid to do it. Fortunately, that kids dad put a stop to that. So there were clearly untoward things going on that parents were aware of and that were clearly against hospital policy from everything we were able to gather so far," Champine said.

Sack served as the chief of pediatric urology at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Toledo. The hospital released a statement saying that the safety and privacy of patients are its top priority. It noted that multiple law enforcement agencies told it the criminal charges were not related to his clinical activity. Sack's attorney did not respond to requests for comment in time for this report.

Champine said the firm does not yet know which specific children appear in the medical photos. He said the case is expected to grow as more parents come forward. "To this date, we don't know who those children are. We don't know if it’s all of the children we have as clients or if it’s some of them," Champine said.