In re Trenshaw v. Jennings.
2025 CO 23. No. 24SA262. Physician-Patient Privilege—CRS § 13-90-107(1)(d)—Waiver of the Physician-Patient Privilege—Clark v. District Court—People v. Covington—Jordan v. Terumo BCT, Inc.—CRCP 26(b)(5)—C.A.R. 21.
May 12, 2025
In this original proceeding, the supreme court held that when, as here, medical records contain information provided by a patient to a physician during the course of receiving treatment for an injury, the records are protected by the physician-patient privilege. Such documents fall within the purview of CRS § 13-90-107(1)(d) because they contain information “that was necessary to enable [the treating physician] to prescribe or act for the patient.” CRS § 13-90-107(1)(d).
Of course, the information shared by a patient with a treating physician may include facts about the underlying incident that led to the injuries sustained. A patient cannot immunize from disclosure relevant facts about the underlying incident by simply disclosing them to a treating physician or anyone else with whom the patient may have a confidential relationship. Those facts are discoverable, including through interrogatories, requests for admission, and depositions. But the medical records themselves are privileged because they contain the patient’s communications with the treating physician about how the injuries were sustained.
Accordingly, the district court should not have reviewed (even in camera) a screenshot of a portion of Jennings’s medical records, much less conducted a sentence-by-sentence analysis of a handful of sentences to determine whether the information in each sentence was necessary for his treating physician to prescribe or act on his behalf. A standard that would only protect information in medical records that a court, in hindsight, concludes was necessary for a physician to have acted or prescribed on behalf of a patient flies in the face of our jurisprudence and is, in any event, infeasible.
Because the district court erred, the court made absolute the order to show cause. The matter was remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.