MASSIVE TCPA DISCOVERY ORDER: Court Orders Healthcare Company To Produce Every Wrong Number Code, Flag, And Field Across Every Outbound Campaign

Hi TCPAWorld!

In Mitchelmore v. AdaptHealth Corp., No. 4:25-cv-3642, 2026 WL 2151154 (S.D. Tex. July 1, 2026), the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas granted in part a motion to compel. AdaptHealth has fourteen days to identify every code, flag, checkbox, dropdown value, and text field it uses to record that it reached a wrong number or a wrong person, and where each appears. Not just in the campaign that called the plaintiff. In all of them.

Background

Jordan Mitchelmore sued in August 2025. He says AdaptHealth called his cell phone at least eleven times in late 2024 with a prerecorded voice, chasing a debt owed by the prior user of his number. He had no debt or account with Adapthealth. He seeks to represent a Rule 23(b)(3) class of everyone who received a prerecorded call at a number not assigned to an AdaptHealth customer or account holder.

Interrogatory No. 5 asked AdaptHealth to describe every way it records that a person reported reaching the wrong number or wrong person, including the codes and fields involved and where they appear. AdaptHealth objected. Discovery should stay inside the collections campaign that dialed the plaintiff, it argued, because its patient care and emergency disaster campaigns are exempt and five of its six other billing campaigns played the recording only into voicemail, where nobody could report anything. And the volume was enormous: 18 million calls in that campaign, 163 million across all campaigns since November 2022.

A declaration from a senior technology director added that a campaign setting had kept those reports from being logged in Genesys Cloud for three years. Then, the day before the hearing, AdaptHealth filed a notice. It had checked again, and located the wrap-up codes for every call in the campaign.

Why The Order Reaches Every Campaign

The relevance holding is short. A record that a call recipient reported a wrong number or wrong person is, in the court’s words, essentially a record of a call to a non-customer and non-account holder, which is the proposed class. So they bear on numerosity, predominance, the merits, and whether AdaptHealth kept calling after learning it had the wrong person, which the court tied to treble damages under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(3).

Confining discovery to the plaintiff’s campaign failed too. Relying on Starling v. KeyCity Capital, LLC, No. 3:21-cv-818, 2022 WL 198403 (N.D. Tex. Jan. 21, 2022), the court explained that the TCPA is not content based. It bars prerecorded calls to certain people without consent whatever the message says. And a class action is an exception to the rule that a case belongs to the named parties alone.

The Health Care Exemptions Did Not Stop Discovery

AdaptHealth argued its patient care calls were exempt health care messages and its emergency disaster calls were exempt emergency purpose calls, so neither needed searching. The Court disagreed. Quoting Coleman v. Rite Aid of Georgia, Inc., 284 F. Supp. 3d 1343, 1347 (N.D. Ga. 2018), it noted the lack of clarity about when health care related calls are exempt, and that many courts read the Health Care Rule as excusing only prior express written consent. The exemptions go to the merits. They were not a basis to exclude whole categories of calls from discovery before the defense had been assessed.

Takeaways

For healthcare callers, the patient care and emergency exemptions will not keep a campaign out of discovery. They are contested and fact bound, and this court would not resolve them here. If they share a platform with collections campaigns, expect the platform to be reachable.

And be careful what you tell a court about your own systems. AdaptHealth declared that a configuration setting had stopped the logging, then told the court the day before the hearing that it had located the codes after all. The court treated that as a concession of misstating what its systems saved, and called the remaining explanation “self-serving and untested.”

We will keep you posted, TCPAWorld!