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Who are you people and why are you doing this?
A: Wesley Crawford was a patient at the North Knoxville Medical Center in Powell, Tennessee and Colleen Crawford, his wife, was his surrogate decision-maker when he couldn’t speak for himself.
We’re ordinary people who ran into something that didn’t sit right and we couldn’t find anyone else willing to do anything about it. No legal background. No political connections. No funding. Just a problem that was too big to ignore and a stubborn belief that ordinary people can learn to use the systems that exist — courts, Congress, public record — even without a law degree.
Our type of case–Tennessee Health Care Liability Act–required a 60-day presuit notice to be sent to potential defendants, which we complied with before filing the lawsuit. That notice gave us an advance notice of what was to come. Before we filed the lawsuit, we were contacted by two of the lawyers that would eventually become counsel for several potential defendants. It was also our first experience of how were going to be treated if we filed the case.
Concealment of medical records had already been taking place, but one of the lawyers tricked us into thinking she was going to get the missing records for us. She requested a list of records, which we sent, and then she became the gatekeeper to prevent us from gaining access to the medical records.
We started researching. It took us several months to create the original complaint (a whopping 400+ pages with over pleading and may pro se mistakes) and then we filed it on September 4, 2024.
We had already started documenting everything because we figured if we were going to learn this the hard way, we might as well make the learning useful to someone else, eventually, and now is the time for us to tell our story.
The cases involve private equity ownership of hospitals — a largely visible force that has reshaped American healthcare in ways many patients are aware of, but only see the medical malpractice side of it. We see the dots that are connected behind the scenes and learned the patient consent form has a dual purpose, and in our case, it is not to put the patient first.
We think this deserves more scrutiny than it’s getting. So we’re giving it some.
We’re not attorneys. Nothing here is legal advice. We’re people who got curious about why the hospital was concealing medical records, and why they had a corporate director contact us to interfere in our attempts to get the records. We knew the hospital was being controlled by financial instruments, and we took a different approach than what patients normally take.
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