Duke's $3.74 Million MyChart Deadline Is Sunday — but Both Ways to File Need an ID Only a Phone Line That Closed Friday Can Replace

The claim window in Afrika Williams v. Duke University Health System, Inc., Case No. 1:22-cv-00727 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina, closes on Sunday, August 16, 2026. The official settlement site states it plainly: “All Claim Forms must be submitted online or postmarked no later than August 16, 2026.”

You are in the class if you reside in the United States and Duke Health identified you as having logged into the Duke MyChart patient portal or the MyDuke Health mobile app at least once between February 18, 2019, and June 17, 2022. Per court documents, that is 872,634 individuals — against a settlement fund of $3,743,600. The lawsuit alleged that a tracking pixel on Duke Health's website could have disclosed personal or health-related information to a vendor. Duke Health denies all claims and all wrongdoing, and the court has not ruled that it did anything wrong.

The case traces back to a 2022 report by The Markup that found pixel tracking on Duke's appointment scheduling page alongside dozens of other large hospital systems. Duke Health said at the time that it “did not transmit any of its patients' protected health information to Meta.” The settlement resolves the dispute without deciding it.

This is the part that turns a deadline into a trap, and it is verifiable in about a minute on the administrator's own pages.

Filing online requires two credentials. The settlement site's instructions read: “Before Claim Filing: You will need the Unique ID and PIN printed on the Postcard Notice you received in the mail.” On the login screen both fields carry a required-field marker. There is no “file without my ID” path.

Filing by mail does not escape it. The downloadable paper Claim Form carries a field marked “*Unique ID” with its own footnote: “Your Unique ID can be found on the email or Postcard Notice you received informing you about this Settlement. If you need additional help locating this Unique ID, please contact the Settlement Administrator at (888) 893-8721.” The paper route skips the PIN, but not the ID.

So if the postcard is gone, every road leads to one phone number. And the administrator's Contact page states the hours: “Call Center Hours: 6 a.m. – 6 p.m. PT / Monday – Friday Except Holidays.” August 16 is a Sunday. August 15 is a Saturday. Friday, August 14 was the last day that phone line was open before the deadline. The administrator is Epiq; there is also an email address, info@DUHSSettlement.com, but no published response time, and a weekend turnaround on a lookup request is not something the site promises.

Two honest paths remain, and one closes tonight.

If you still have the postcard or the notice email: file online at DUHSSettlement.com. It works on a Sunday — a web form has no business hours. This is also the only route that gets you an electronic payment: the Claim Form states that “Payment will be mailed in the form of a check… If you would like to receive a payment electronically (e.g., via Venmo, PayPal, or ACH), you must submit a Claim Form online.” Mail-in claims are paid by paper check only.

If you are mailing a paper form: it must be postmarked by August 16 — a Sunday, when retail postmarks are generally not available. Practically, that makes Saturday, August 15 the last day to obtain a qualifying postmark at a counter with weekend hours. The address is Williams v. Duke University Health System, Inc., Settlement Administrator, P.O. Box 4214, Portland, OR 97208-4214.

One more constraint worth knowing before you file twice: the Claim Form states that “Each Settlement Class Member will receive, at most, one (1) payment.” Duplicate submissions do not double anything.

Duke's settlement pays a genuine pro rata share — the official FAQ describes “a pro rata cash payment from the Net Settlement Fund,” and court filings describe it as an equal share of what remains after deductions. That means your check depends entirely on how many other people file.

The deductions are disclosed. Class Counsel will seek fees up to 33% of the fund, or $1,235,388, plus expenses up to $30,000, and there is a $7,500 service award for one class representative. Notice and administration costs also come out of the fund, and the site does not publish that figure — so the net below is an upper bound, not a promise.

Working from $3,743,600 minus $1,235,388 minus $30,000 minus $7,500 leaves roughly $2.47 million for the class before administration costs. Spread across scenarios (this arithmetic is ours, not the administrator's):

• If all 872,634 class members filed: about $2.83 each
• At a 10% claim rate (87,263 claims): about $28
• At a 5% claim rate (43,631 claims): about $57
• At a 3% claim rate (26,179 claims): about $94

Consumer class actions routinely see claim rates in the low single digits, which is why the realistic range here is tens of dollars rather than the $2.83 a full-participation split would produce. Nobody can promise a number, and the administrator wisely does not publish one.

There is a second date on the Duke timeline that got far less attention, and for anyone discovering this settlement now it is the consequential one: July 20, 2026 was the deadline both to exclude yourself and to object.

That window is shut. If you are reading about this case for the first time this weekend, you no longer have the option to keep your own claim against Duke Health — the release binds you whether or not you file. As the site puts it, “IF YOU DO NOTHING, you will not receive Settlement benefits, but you will still be bound by the Settlement.” Doing nothing is now strictly worse than filing: you have already paid the price of the release, and the only question left is whether you collect for it.

The Final Approval Hearing is August 27, 2026, at 9:30 a.m. ET before the Middle District of North Carolina in Greensboro. Money moves only after final approval and the resolution of any appeal — realistically late 2026 at the earliest, and later if anyone appeals.