A Pittsburgh-area woman who disclosed sensitive and confidential medical information to her doctor is suing Allegheny Health Network and Highmark alleging that she was not properly notified about the artificial intelligence recording tool they use in the clinical setting.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court, said the use of Abridge, an AI tool, by AHN and Highmark in their exam rooms violated the woman’s sense of trust and control.
“The harm is real. Plaintiff and class members have lost the ability to trust that what they tell their doctors stays private,” the lawsuit said. “They have suffered distress knowing their health information was handed to a stranger and used to build that stranger’s technology. They paid for confidential care they did not receive. And their information now sits with a third party, indefinitely and outside their control.”
AHN began using Abridge in 2024, the complaint said, and it has expanded to approximately 400 AHN providers across more than 40 specialties. Highmark began using it, the lawsuit continued, in August 2025 at its hospitals and outpatient locations.
Once the Abridge program is activated, the complaint said, it records the entire conversation between patient and clinician and sends the recording out of the building to Abridge AI Inc.’s servers. The servers then use the recordings to train their own commercial AI models “turning patients’ most private disclosures into raw material for its products. Once a conversation is used to train a model, it cannot be taken back.”
Abridge, a multibillion dollar company, is being used by more than 300 health systems that collectively serve more than 250 million patients, the lawsuit said.
The woman, identified in the complaint only by initials, said some patients were told nothing about the use of the recording program, while others heard only “a passing reference to an artificial intelligence tool, without being told what the tool was, where the recording would go, who would have access to it or what would be done with it.”
She is seeking to have the lawsuit declared a class action. It includes claims for violations of Pennsylvania wiretap laws, breach of doctor-patient confidentiality, common law invasion of privacy, negligence, breach of implied contract and unjust enrichment.
It also asserts the use of Abridge is a violation of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
A spokesman for AHN and Highmark declined to comment on Friday.
Similar lawsuits have been filed in California against medical systems there over the use of Abridge.
‘A betrayal’
According to the complaint, the plaintiff was hospitalized in June for two weeks for inpatient treatment following a suicide attempt.
Two days after her discharge, she sought follow-up care at AHN Suburban in Bellevue.
During the visit, the lawsuit said, the woman provided sensitive medical information. While she was told an artificial intelligence tool would be used during the appointment, the lawsuit said, that was all that was disclosed.
“No one told plaintiff that the tool would record her entire conversation with her provider, that the recording would be transmitted to Abridge AI Inc., or that Abridge AI Inc. could retain the conversation and use it for its own commercial purposes,” the lawsuit said.
The name of the AI tool was not provided, and it was not made clear it belonged to an outside company, the complaint continued.
“A reasonable patient hearing that disclosure would understand the ‘AI’ to be part of defendants’ own systems, operating within the same circle of confidentiality as her clinician and her medical chart,” the plaintiff said.
Being told AI is being used, the suit continued, is not the same as disclosing what will then happen to the recordings collected.
“The betrayal was not abstract. Plaintiff shared deeply personal information under the reasonable, legally protected assumption that her conversations would remain confidential. A passing reference to ‘AI’ did not tell her that a company that was a stranger to her care would receive, keep and potentially use every word she said,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit asserts that Pennsylvania law forbids recording a conversation unless every party has given prior consent.
That did not happen in this case, the complaint said.
“What she was told fell far short of what informed consent requires,” the complaint continued.
The use of Abridge by AHN has expanded from clinical operations to outpatient practices, emergency departments and home care.
“This was not a one-off lapse,” the lawsuit said. “Defendants had clear business reasons to adopt this technology quickly, such as lightening clinicians’ note-writing burden, tightening up billing documentation, and, for Highmark, accelerating prior authorization for its health-plan members.
”These benefits came without a matching investment in lawful consent infrastructure, authorization protocols or adequate safeguards necessary to protect patients’ confidential information.”
Once Abridge is activated in the room, the lawsuit said, it listens continuously, sends the audio to the company’s infrastructure for processing and returns a draft note that gets folded into the patient’s electronic medical chart.
The information being collected, the complaint continued, holds monetary value. It saves the defendants money by reducing clinician documentation time, which therefore allows them to see more patients and bill more.
“This is not merely a theoretical allegation about the value of patient data,” the lawsuit said.
In June 2025, Abridge AI Inc. was valued at $5.3 billion — nearly double what it had been four months earlier — the plaintiff said.
Each patient visit, the lawsuit said, contributed incrementally to that multibillion-dollar growth.
”Plaintiff and class members received no share of that value, were not informed that their confidential medical communications were contributing to it and did not give informed consent to that use of their data,” the suit said.
The lawsuit seeks an injunction prohibiting the defendants from using Abridge or any other recording technology without providing clear disclosure and obtaining consent, as well as monetary damages.
An impact on healthcare
Irene Y. Chen, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who studies AI in healthcare, said patients can benefit from the use of recording programs like Abridge because they may feel their doctors are more present — talking to them instead of typing notes into a laptop.
“Clinicians and other medical staff face tremendous burdens and workloads these days. Physician burnout is at an all-time high,” Chen said. “The goal of this technology is to make medical documentation easier so that doctors can focus on connecting with patients.”
However, in her research, she has found a high volume of errors in AI deployment systems, including with medications and when a patient provides the history of their current illness.
“Although these tools are not marketed as making clinical decisions, errors can compound and affect clinical care,” Chen said.
She believes AI scribes could be hugely impactful in healthcare, but there must be careful review to ensure the technology is used responsibly.
“Right now, these systems are deployed without critical analysis of how they might fail, for example, for patients with accents or with complicated medication names,” Chen said. “I would want to see more diligent and proactive evaluations as well as dynamic responses to emerging failures of the model.”