A Pennsylvania Lawsuit Filed on July 15, 2009 Is Finally Paying Out: Datavant Refunds 35 Percent of the Medical-Record Copy Fees That About 50,000 Patients, Lawyers and Insurers Paid IOD Between 2005 and 2012 — Up to $9.27 Million, Notice ID Required, and Whatever Goes Unclaimed Returns to Datavant

The notice puts the claim in one paragraph: IOD “breached an implied contract by failing to disclose and charge persons or businesses, who had requested copies of medical records, the estimated actual and reasonable expenses for locating, retrieving, reproducing, and transmitting the records,” and instead billed the maximum basic, search-and-retrieval and reproduction fees that 42 Pa.C.S. § 6152(a)(2)(i) permitted between July 15, 2005 and September 3, 2012. IOD's answer, filed March 16, 2020, is equally compact: the Act authorized the statutory rates “without regard to” actual cost; the requesters knew the charges and paid them voluntarily; the charges were in any case based on IOD's own estimated expenses.

On July 5, 2012, while a companion case was pending at the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the General Assembly amended the Act to eliminate the actual-cost argument — copying companies may now charge the statutory maximums regardless of expense, and that version “continues in force to this day.” Anyone who paid for records after September 3, 2012 therefore has no claim, which is why the class ends on that date and why this is a refund on invoices that are fourteen to twenty-one years old.

The class is anyone who requested copies of medical records from a Pennsylvania provider or facility, was charged and paid IOD or its subsidiaries those maximum fees in that window, and was sent the mailed notice: patients, their designees, attorneys on either side of a case, insurers, and people who served a subpoena without a patient's authorization. Not included: requests that needed no patient authorization, radiological images, insurers auditing under a written contract, healthcare providers, and government entities.

The complaint was filed July 15, 2009, one of six related medical-records-fee cases that Judge Wettick coordinated for pretrial management; the others named UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside, UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital, MRO Corporation, Duplications Inc. and IOD Technologies. The trial court's June 17, 2010 ruling — that the Act limited charges to actual and reasonable expenses — went up on interlocutory appeal in the MRO case; the Superior Court rejected it on August 11, 2011; the Supreme Court took the case on February 22, 2012, refused to dismiss it after the July 2012 amendment, and on June 14, 2014 reversed the Superior Court (Wayne M. Chiurazzi Law, Inc. v. MRO Corp., 97 A.3d 275). The MRO case settled in 2018.

This one kept going: a First Amended Complaint on June 16, 2015 substituting David Landay as class representative; an answer in March 2020; cross-motions for judgment on the pleadings from 2021; Kirkland & Ellis appearing for the defense; “extensive, contentious discovery”; Ciox Health becoming a party in February 2024 and renaming itself Datavant on March 14, 2025; a substitution of Datavant on May 18, 2026 and a re-captioning order on May 26. Mediation before retired Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan produced the agreement, signed June 5 and 8, 2026; Judge Hertzberg certified the settlement class and preliminarily approved it on June 16, 2026, with mailed notice to follow within thirty days.

The agreement defines the Settlement Claims Amount as “35% of the total amount paid by the Settlement Class for basic fees, retrieval fees, and per page copying fees paid to Defendant from July 15, 2005 to September 3, 2012,” and caps it at $9,268,095. Read backwards, that cap corresponds to about $26.5 million in eligible fees across the 379,126 record requests IOD's data attributes to the class — roughly $70 paid and $24 refunded per request, and about $185 per class member on average if every one of the roughly 50,000 filed for every request. Individual amounts will differ by orders of magnitude: a patient who ordered her own chart once sits at one end, a personal-injury firm that ordered records for hundreds of clients at the other.

Two mechanics matter more than the average. First, the fund is claims-made: Datavant funds the settlement account within fourteen days of the Effective Date with an initial $400,000, tops it up in $100,000 steps as valid claims are paid, and “if Valid Claims are less than the amount in the Settlement Account, the Settlement Administrator shall promptly return all unused funds to Defendant within 21 days after the Effective Date.” Pro rata reduction applies only if valid claims exceed $9,268,095. Second, fees are outside: Datavant pays up to $1,950,000 in attorneys' fees, up to $32,500 in costs and a $25,000 service award to Mr. Landay “separate and apart” from the class money, plus notice and administration costs the agreement expects to stay under $140,000. Class counsel's fee memorandum allocates approximately 3,365 hours of the coordinated litigation to this action and describes the request as below a lodestar figure.

Payment comes within thirty days after the Effective Date — the point at which the final approval order can no longer be appealed — by paper check valid for ninety days, or, if elected on the electronic Proof of Claim, by Zelle, PayPal, Venmo, ACH or an electronic Mastercard. The notice warns that resolving appeals “can take time, perhaps more than a year.”

Every class member's claimable total was computed from IOD's invoice records — Datavant's data, checked by the administrator, American Legal Claim Services — and either printed on the mailed notice or held behind the Class Member ID — a QR code, or Notice ID plus PIN — on IODSettlementPA.com. Logging in shows a Transaction List: invoice number, invoice date, whose records were requested, from which provider, what IOD's records say was paid, and the 35-percent benefit for each line. A claimant may file for all lines or select some. Patients who requested their own records also received a paper Proof of Claim with the notice; non-patient requesters — law firms, insurers — can only file through the website. Anyone who believes they belong in the class but got no notice is told to contact the administrator at 800-641-9110 or info@iodsettlementpa.com.

The notice addresses a question most settlements never raise: who the refund belongs to when someone else reimbursed the fee. “If you paid IOD for the medical records copying request but were reimbursed for that payment by someone else, you should consider whether any Settlement Benefits are required to be paid to the person or entity who reimbursed you,” and, more pointedly, “attorneys who were reimbursed by their client(s) may have an ethical obligation to hold Settlement Benefits in their client trust account and return the funds to their client(s).” A successor or beneficiary of a class member — a closed law firm's former partner, an estate — may claim with supporting documents.

The preliminary approval order sets everything as day-counts from the final fairness hearing, and the administrator has translated them. September 16, 2026: objections and notices of intent to appear must be received — filed with the Allegheny County Department of Court Records, 414 Grant Street, and mailed to class counsel and to Datavant's counsel at Marcus & Shapira — and any lawyer appearing for an objector must have entered an appearance by the same day. October 1, 2026: requests for exclusion must be received by mail at Exclusion Requests – Landay v. IOD/Datavant, Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 23459, Jacksonville, FL 32241, with the case caption, Notice ID, contact details and signature; the notice says twice that the postmark does not count. October 16, 2026, 9:00 a.m.: the fairness hearing in Room 816 of the City-County Building, where Judge Hertzberg also rules on the fee motion filed in advance. November 30, 2026: the Proof of Claim must be received, online by 11:59 p.m. Eastern or by mail at P.O. Box 23459 — forty-five days after the hearing, and again regardless of postmark.