He left dozens of patients to meet a prostitute. Instead, a cop was waiting, report says.

A Charlotte-area medical professional has been publicly reprimanded for abandoning dozens of urgent care patients in the midst of the pandemic to meet a would-be prostitute for sex.

On March 18, 2021, Jeffrey Michael Harrell, a licensed physician assistant then working in Virginia, was the only provider on duty at his Richmond-area urgent care center when he sent a text to a person he believed to be a teenage sex worker, according to a filing by the N.C. Medical Board.

Harrell, who most recently worked in Hickory, then left work, telling fellow staff members that he had to take care of a maintenance issue at his apartment complex.

In fact, according to the medical board filing, Harrell went to a nearby hotel. There, he was greeted by an undercover police officer and charged with felony solicitation of a minor along with a related misdemeanor. He later pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of misdemeanor solicitation and received a suspended six-month sentence, Virginia medical records show.

On the day of the incident, Harrell never returned to work. Left behind were dozens of patients, including about 20 who had come to the urgent care center to be tested for COVID-19. All had to be referred to other treatment facilities or had their appointments canceled outright, according to the filing.

Harrell could not be reached for comment Thursday and Friday. His disciplinary files in North Carolina do not include the name of an attorney.

The day after his arrest, Harrell told his boss by email that he left his shift to run an errand and that his car had been stolen when he stopped to help another driver, the filing claims. He was fired that day, according to records from the Virginia Board of Medicine.

Later that same year, Harrell joined the staff of Urgent Care of Mountain View, which operates urgent care centers north of Charlotte in Hickory, Morganton, Taylorsville and Newton.

On Thursday he was still listed as a staff member on the Mountain View website. Yet, when The Charlotte Observer called the company’s Hickory clinic to talk to Harrell, the woman who answered the phone said, “He no longer works here, and we don’t know where he’s gone.” She declined to elaborate.

Left in his wake are multiple disciplinary actions in two states.

The Virginia Board of Medicine reprimanded Harrell for the prostitution incident in March 2022. The N.C. Medical Board followed suit a year later.

Harrell, who received his N.C. Medical license in 2015, notified the N.C. Medical Board of his solicitation arrest and conviction on Sept. 19, 2021, as part of the process to renew his license.

Yet, according to the Medical Board’s disciplinary filing in March 2023, Harrell withheld or misrepresented many of the details of the incident during his interview with a board investigator.

For example, Harrell claimed he had not offered money for sex to an erstwhile prostitute but had only agreed to go on a lunch date with a woman he had met on a dating app a few days before, the filing shows.

“Furthermore, Mr. Harrell never mentioned ... anything about abandoning the urgent care where he was employed, as the only on-duty provider with patients waiting to be seen, in order to meet the purported woman,” the board wrote.

Prior transgressions

Harrell, a military veteran, had run afoul of regulators in both states before, again for a violation in Virginia.

In May 2021, he was publicly reprimanded in North Carolina for the first time for prescribing medication from 2015-2018 to a female patient with whom he had — or was still having — an intimate relationship. He lost his job in Virginia over the matter and was reprimanded by Virginia authorities in September 2020. His attorney at the time, Michael Goodman of Richmond, did not immediately respond to an Observer email requesting comment.

In its March filing, the N.C. Medical Board said it had ordered Harrell to be examined by Pine Grove Behavioral Health and Addiction Services in Hattiesburg, Miss., which found that while Harrell did not pose “an imminent threat to patient safety,” he required treatment “to prevent possible, future patient harm.”

The medical board banned Harrell from treating female patients until he complied with all of Pine Grove’s treatment recommendations. Those included residential or partial-hospitilization levels of care to address “inappropriate and disruptive behavior among physicians, including sexual and non-sexual boundary concerns, as well as general professional issues.”

It’s unknown what treatment Harrell has completed. His medical license in North Carolina comes up for renewal in November.