RI Doctor Claims AI Medical Firm Fired Him After Raising Concerns About FDA and HIPAA Compliance
GoLocalProv News Team
RI Doctor Claims AI Medical Firm Fired Him After Raising Concerns About FDA and HIPAA Compliance
The legal fight emerging features a pediatric psychiatrist at Brown University Health, Bhargav Patel, and an AI company that has a number of business names but is marketed as Sully.AI.
Patel is suing Sully.AI and a number of the company's executives.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTAccording to the lawsuit filed this week, “The Defendants’ business involves developing, marketing, and supporting AI-powered medical software for physicians and hospitals across the country and abroad, including in Rhode Island, aimed at increasing physician efficiency and efficacy.”
The company's tagline is "Sully is the most integrated Superhuman team of AI-employees for healthcare. Loved by healthcare organizations and platforms with over 100,000 providers."
According to Patel’s suit against the company and its top executives, “While serving in various roles culminating in his appointment as Chief Medical Officer of Defendant Odiggo Inc. d/b/a Sully.ai, Plaintiff performed extensive duties that significantly advanced Defendants’ business operations and revenue. Despite these contributions, Defendants failed to compensate him for months of work, misclassified him as an independent contractor for a period of time, and ultimately terminated his employment after he raised concerns about Defendants’ apparent noncompliance with applicable law, including FDA and HIPAA requirements.”
Sully.AI is a foreign company registered in Delaware and headquartered in California.
Recruited — A "Win-Win"
According to Patel’s suit, "When Defendants recruited Patel, Defendant Omar and Defendants’ COO/President, Defendant Ahmed Nasser ('Nasser'), promised him that Defendant would create a 'win-win' scenario where Patel would be fairly compensated. On or about March 8, 2024, Defendant Nasser messaged Patel stating, 'Let’s get you on whichever role you want, we find the best people in the world working in this field and we let them pick what they want to work on … open to providing any kind of compensation based on your effort/time.’”
“Defendants hired Patel on or about March 11, 2024. On or about March 29, 2024, Defendants provided Patel access to the company’s Slack platform, used exclusively for work-related communications,” claims the suit.
Further, “From on or about March through November of 2024, Plaintiff worked on average approximately five (5) to ten (10) hours per week for Defendants, and performed a cornucopia of duties, including but not limited to designing ads and scripts that helped Defendants book over five hundred (500) meetings, gathering website testimonials by leveraging his Brown University physician credibility, designing psychiatric note templates, consulting on Defendants’ platform, providing marketing and social media advice, and securing clinic subscribers totaling over $15,000 in annual revenue.”
Compensation and Equity Options
According to the lawsuit, "After diligently performing these duties for about eight (8) months without any kind of compensation, Patel discussed Defendants’ failure to compensate him with Defendants Omar and Nasser, asking for fair compensation. As a result, on or about November 22, 2024, Defendants hired him as Medical Director and began compensating Patel in the amount of $5,000 per month as a purported independent contractor, without benefits."
“However, Defendants failed to compensate Patel at all for all the work performed between on or about March 11, 2024, and November 21, 2024. Then, on or about January 31, 2025, Defendants started compensating Patel as a W-2 employee, wherein Plaintiff was compensated $5,000 per month plus health benefits and a grant of about $30,000 worth of equity options,” states the lawsuit.
Promotion
“Patel’s excellent performance also earned him a promotion to Chief Medical Officer on or about July 22, 2025. This promotion came with a salary increase to $14,000 per month and approximately $250,000 worth of equity in the form of about 79,029 in restricted stock shares. Around the same time, Patel helped recruit a desperately needed head of engineering, about whom Defendants Omar and Nasser were very excited,” claims the lawsuit.
False Claim Allegations
The relationship begins to unravel when Patel claims top executives provided misleading information in order to close a sale.
According to the lawsuit, the scenario played out as follows:
Then, on or about August 4, 2025, Plaintiff joined a call with Defendant Nasser and a prospective hospital customer to whom Defendants were attempting to sell an AI radiologist.
Patel was told that the product was basically a ChatGPT wrapper, but on the call, Defendant Nasser claimed Defendants were utilizing an FDA approved AI model.
When the hospital’s representative responded that their own research failed to discover the existence of an FDA approved AI radiologist model, Defendant Nasser became upset and abruptly ended the call.
Shortly after the call, Patel complained to Defendant Nasser that it is both criminal and misleading to represent a product as FDA approved when it was not.
Patel also expressed the same concerns to Amit Kumthekar (“Kumthekar”), Defendants’ head of research, and a sales team member named Rouhaan.
Patel also expressed the same concerns to co-founder Henry Duong (“Duong”), stating, “I think we should be a little more careful with those things. Don’t want to expose ourselves to legal liability when it comes to compliance/FDA approval type things.”
That episode set off a series of events that ultimately led to the company firing Patel, according to the lawsuit. He claims he was raising concerns about federal compliance and he is a whistleblower.
GoLocal reached out to the company for comment, and did not receive any response at the time of publication.
The six-count civil lawsuit seeks back wages and damages among the many claims.