In a pair of videos, Bosworth accused Penn Medicine of failing to hire enough doctors to read the X-rays of his client and others, despite having plenty of money. One of the posts, on April 4, was titled"Medicine Has Become a Money Machine," in which he quoted a Penn physician who had testified in the case that the radiology department was"massively understaffed."
They did not succeed. In an April 14 ruling, Cohen said the videos could stand, ruling that Bosworth had not violated the state's rules of professional conduct for lawyers. The judge did not elaborate, nor did he address the content of the videos, but it was clear he believed that the case had pushed the law toward a new frontier.
Bosworth initially complied. But separately, he continued to post other criticisms of health systems and insurance companies on his TikTok page. In one titled"The Dirty Truth About Hospitals," he claimed all hospitals have executives whose job is to cover up medical mistakes. Kline and partner Shanin Specter grew increasingly uneasy. In November, they fired him, accusing him of devoting too much energy to his social-media presence and not enough time to managing cases.
Not accurate, the health system says. The formal term is radiologic technologists, and some of them do get special training to perform preliminary reviews of X-rays, at Penn and elsewhere. But they do not interpret the images or render a diagnosis. Those functions are the job of radiologists — physicians — and Penn Medicine has plenty, health system officials said in a statement.
Bosworth also deposed Penn's chief of radiology, Mitchell Schnall, who testified that the department"could be 10% to 15% better staffed," a quote not included in the video. But ordinarily, such testimony is not part of the public record, and lawyers for Penn argued that by broadcasting excerpts from it, Bosworth had prejudiced the pool of potential jurors. They warned that Bosworth's use of TikTok had enabled him to spread the information with remarkable speed, as one of the videos had been forwarded hundreds of times.