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Cronin v. Sierra Medical Center6/19/2000
felt wherever the client or patient may go, it would be fundamentally unfair to permit a suit in whatever distant jurisdiction the patient may carry the consequences of his treatment, or the client the consequences of the advice received.
Unlike a case involving voluntary interstate or international economic activity, which is directed at the forum state's markets, the residence of a recipient of personal services rendered elsewhere is irrelevant and totally incidental to the benefits provided by the defendant at his own location. It is clear that when a client or a patient travels to receive professional services without having been solicited (which is prohibited by most professional codes of ethics), then the client, who originally traveled to seek services apparently not available at home, ought to expect that he will have to travel again if he thereafter complains that the services sought by him in the foreign jurisdiction were therein rendered improperly.
Any other rule would seem to be not only fundamentally unfair, but would inflict upon the professions the obligation of traveling to defend suits brought in foreign jurisdictions, sometimes very distant jurisdictions, there brought solely because the patient or client upon his return to his own home decided to sue at home for services sought by himself abroad. Gelineau v. New York Univ. Hosp., 375 F. Supp. 661, 667 (D.N.J.1974) (citation and footnote omitted); Tarango, 94 N.M. at 729-30, 616 P.2d at 442-43 (quoting the same passage from Gelineau).
We acknowledge Plaintiffs' argument that their case differs from Gelineau and Tarango in that they allege a continuing tort, whereas the other cited cases involve a discrete set of services that could be said to have been rendered strictly outside the patient's home state. This point notwithstanding, we fail to see why the case at bar falls outside the purview of Valley Wide Health Services, Inc.. When a person unilaterally seeks specialty care, which Patient no doubt did by traveling to Texas to undergo heart bypass surgery and then again to receive treatment for his staph infection, follow-up care, including medical prescriptions, are almost sure to follow. This type of follow-up care, without any evidence that the non-resident physician reached into the forum state in order to attract the patient's business, simply does not constitute the purposeful availment that is both contemplated in and required by our due process analysis. Nor are we impressed by Patient's conclusory affidavit that all doctors "provided medical services to me . . . at Mountain Shadows." The 600-page record in this case is replete with case notes, discharge summaries, and specific information, and all it shows is the transfer of follow-up care, including prescriptions, to New Mexico. See Rivera v. Trujillo, 1999-NMCA-129, 8, 128 N.M. 106, 990 P.2d 219.
The citizens of New Mexico would be ill-served if we were to establish a rule that effectively compelled non-resident specialist physicians to prescribe only so much medicine as would get patients home. See Prince v. Urban, 57 Cal. Rptr. 2d 181, 186 (Ct. App. 1996). We instead choose to reiterate the longstanding rule that a non-resident defendant will not be subjected to the jurisdiction of the courts of this State unless his or her activities are properly characterized as purposeful availment, rather than incidental. See Valley Wide Health Servs., Inc., 106 N.M. at 72-73, 738 P.2d at 1317-18
CONCLUSION
For the reasons stated, we affirm in part and reverse in part and remand with instructions to the trial court to reinstate Plaintiffs' complaint against Hospital only.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
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