Rule 2:505.Healing Arts Practitioner and Patient Privilege (derived from Code § 8.01-399).

Rule 2:505 does not state its own privilege rule; it incorporates by reference the physician-patient privilege set out in Code section 8.01-399, reproducing the statute’s current text as it applies to civil cases. Subdivision (a) states the default: except at the patient’s request or with the patient’s consent, a duly licensed practitioner of the healing arts cannot testify in a civil action about information acquired while attending, examining, or treating the patient in a professional capacity.

Subdivision (b) opens a controlled path around that default when the patient’s physical or mental condition is itself at issue in the case. The practitioner’s diagnoses, signs and symptoms, observations, evaluations, histories, and treatment plan — as contemporaneously documented — along with facts learned in the course of treatment, may be disclosed, but only through discovery under the Rules of Court or through trial testimony, not through informal channels. A court can order disclosure when necessary to the proper administration of justice, though it cannot compel a party to sign a medical-records release unless the provider is outside Virginia or is a federal facility, and any such order must be limited to records relating to the conditions at issue. If the patient asks and the court finds certain diagnosis or treatment information is not relevant or not reasonably calculated to lead to admissible evidence, that information stays undisclosed — and only a diagnosis offered to a reasonable degree of medical probability is admissible at trial.

Subdivision (d) restricts a different channel: a lawyer, or anyone acting for a lawyer, cannot obtain information about a patient from a healing arts practitioner in connection with litigation without the patient’s consent, except through formal discovery. The rule carves out narrow exceptions — communications between a practitioner’s own defense counsel and the practitioner’s employer or colleagues, information from a practitioner the lawyer hired to examine the patient under Rule 4:10, and limited administrative contact with a practitioner’s staff for scheduling, verifying dates of treatment, explaining a summons, or similar logistics, several of which require the patient or the patient’s attorney to receive simultaneous written notice.

The remaining subdivisions round out the privilege’s edges. Subdivision (c) confirms the privilege does not disturb the separate workers’-compensation privilege for communications between physicians and employers, does not cover information shared in an unlawful attempt to obtain narcotics, and does not stop a practitioner from making disclosures state or federal law requires. Subdivision (e) brings licensed clinical psychologists within the definition of a healing arts practitioner. And subdivision (f) confirms that nothing in the rule stops a practitioner from disclosing information necessary for the patient’s ongoing care, for protecting the practitioner’s own legal rights (including in a malpractice case), for the operation of a health care facility or health maintenance organization, or to comply with other state or federal law.