Hundreds of patients were going to therapy sessions online with an unlicensed practitioner who was using her wife’s credentials to pose as a social worker, according to health officials in Florida and Tennessee who looked into a complaint.
The allegations surfaced only after the death in February of the woman who was posing as a therapist, the state records show.
Patients believed they were receiving therapy from Peggy Randolph, a licensed social worker in Tennessee and Florida who was employed to host sessions with hundreds of clients on video calls from 2021 to 2023, according to a settlement agreement in February between Ms. Randolph and the Tennessee Department of Health. After Ms. Randolph’s wife died in early 2023, Brightside Health, a San Francisco-based online therapy and psychiatry company that employed Ms. Randolph, received a complaint suggesting that her wife “had been the person providing treatment,” according to the agreement, which was first reported Tuesday by KFF Health News and CBS News.
The complaint, which Brightside Health also investigated, claimed that Ms. Randolph “aided and abetted unlicensed activity and defrauded patients,” according the an investigative report published by the Florida Department of Health in March 2023.
“The claimed behavior would be a breach of Randolph’s contractual agreement with Brightside and a violation of her professional code of ethics,” Brightside Health said in a statement. “We’re extremely disappointed that a single provider was willing to violate the trust that Brightside and, most importantly, her patients had placed in her.”
Ms. Randolph’s wife, who is referred to only as T.R. in the agreement, was “not licensed or trained to provide any sort of counseling services,” the agreement said. Ms. Randolph was paid for the counseling sessions that her wife was said to have administered.
Ms. Randolph first denied that T.R. was seeing her patients, but then admitted that she “may have consulted with some of her patients without her knowledge,” according to the Florida Health Department’s investigative report. But as Brightside Health’s investigation progressed, “it became apparent that T.R. was seeing all her patients and had been for a long time,” the report said.
Ms. Randolph, Brightside Health, the Tennessee Department of Health and the Florida Department of Health did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.
Brightside Health fired Ms. Randolph as part of the investigation, and she voluntarily surrendered her license in Tennessee and Florida, the states’ records show. As part of the settlement, Ms. Randolph was also fined $1,000 by the Tennessee Department of Health.
