Door-to-Door Body Scan Company

A NewsChannel 9 investigation has uncovered a problem with a company that has done numerous mammogram scans in the area. That problem involves the collecting of your personal medical information. We've discovered the company is now out of business, taking with it dozens, maybe hundreds of medical scans..

Where is that personal information, and what prompted the shutdown?. NewsChannel 9 went looking for answers..

Devonia Eversole is one of 22 female employees of a Cleveland photo lab business, who welcomed the visit back in June, by a company called Resource Imaging, a Maryville-based company that does mobile mammogram screening for breast cancer. "They were very private," Mrs. Eversole remembers. "They gave us our privacy to change and all that kind of stuff. They seemed to know what they were doing."

A Resource Imaging brochure touts the advantages of mobile screening patients at businesses, health fairs and and senior centers, rather than going to a hospital or your personal visits.

C-P-Q President Paul Kimball says, the Resource Imaging salesman came to the screening with excellent recommendations. "We verified those references and checked with the other companies they'd worked with," he says. "We got glowing references."

After a few weeks and no one called from Resource Imaging, Mr. Kimball got disturbing news: "Our Human Resources manager got an email, saying that all of a sudden the salesman who set up our visit was out of a job and the company's been closed." That was also devastating news to employees, who had also given up personal medical data, social security numbers, and other private information to these total strangers. "What if you do have cancer," she wondered, "and you don't know it because your information is floating around out there somewhere and we don't know if or when we're ever going to get the results of the scans."

Luckily, claims had not been made before the company went under, which made Mr. Kimball wonder, if THAT wasn't part of the problem. "Excessive billing to the insurance company," he said, "which is considered insurance fraud.. that's what I was thinking."

That's what we were thinking too. That is, until we dug deeper into the company that owns Resource Imaging, Procynet. Procynet owned several companies along with Resource Imaging, and ALL of them went under at the same time. From the attorney for Resource Imaging's medical doctor, we also uncovered an investigation, which prompted the business shutdown..

"It is strictly a money issue," says attorney Jim Andrews of Knoxville. "It's where a business manager may have done some things that the business manager may regret having done."

That business manager's name is Ed Whitehouse. His attorney has not returned our calls. Neither has the F-B-I's Knoxville office.

But we want to know if that investigation will affect the mammogram scans and the personal information patients have given up?

"There's nothing for any of the patients to be alarmed about," says Mr. Andrews. "All mammograms, as far as we know, are being read, are going to be read, are going to be interpreted."

No mind, says at least one patient. Mrs. Eversole says, she'll never trust medical scanners, that come to her. "It sort of reminds me of a door-to-door salesman, selling magazines that I know I will never get."

Attorney Andrews says we started looking into the activities of the company, way ahead of the federal investigators, and right now, it's only the tip of the iceberg.. But yesterday afternoon, Mr. Kimball told me some of his other employees did start getting letters from medical professionals about their mammogram scans. So far, all of them that have come back, show no cancer in the employees tested..

Luckily, they won't be part of Resource Imaging's on-going problems..

Many hospitals do their own mammogram screenings, and Doctor Billy Arant of Erlanger's Hypertension Center says, any patient's experience with Resource Imaging is evidence that out-of-town screening companies need to always be checked out as much as possible.

But our investigation continues into these door-to-door medical scans, because many questions are still unanswered about the validity of the scans they perform..