Texas Legal professional Normal Ken Paxton sued Epic this week, alleging that the corporate is monopolizing the EHR market and limiting sufferers’ entry to their very own medical information.
Epic’s EHR programs are put in in additional than 3,600 hospitals within the U.S., giving the corporate roughly 42% of the acute care hospital EHR market — excess of any competitor like Oracle Cerner or Meditech. The Verona, Wisconsin-based firm generated $5.7 billion in income final 12 months.
The lawsuit not solely claims that Epic makes use of its dominant place to stifle competitors, but in addition that it blocks mother and father’ entry to their kids’s medical information as soon as they attain a sure age.
“We is not going to permit woke firms to undermine the sacred rights of oldsters to guard and oversee their children’ medical well-being,” Paxton stated in a statement. “This lawsuit goals to make sure that Texans can readily get hold of entry to those information and profit from the decrease prices and innovation that come from a very aggressive digital well being information market.”
Epic has denied the allegations, calling them misguided.
What’s being alleged?
The complaint, filed Wednesday, argues that Epic leverages its market dominance to forestall hospitals from transferring to competing EHR programs — and that this observe has successfully shut out rival distributors for many years.
“Epic controls who can entry this information, once they can entry it, and the phrases by which they will entry it — regardless of the easy reality that it’s the hospitals’ and sufferers’ information, not Epic’s,” the lawsuit reads.
Basically, Paxton alleges that Epic unlawfully restricts or delays suppliers’ entry to affected person information once they use non-Epic programs, subsequently hindering the circulate of vital medical data and doubtlessly suspending care.
His lawsuit additionally highlights Epic’s use of noncompete agreements, saying that these restrict different corporations’ skill to rent high expertise. As just lately as 2019, these agreements prohibited former Epic workers from working for 1000’s of healthcare software program corporations throughout their noncompete interval, in accordance with the grievance.
How does the guardian angle match into this?
Paxton sees this lawsuit not solely as a transfer to uphold the free market, but in addition as a continuation of his efforts to guard mother and father’ entry to their kids’s medical information.
In October, his workplace settled with an Austin-based clinic after its affected person file system allegedly locked mother and father out of their kids’s accounts as soon as they turned 12.
Paxton’s workplace is claiming that Epic hides well being information from mother and father as soon as the kid turns 12, saying that this violates Texas’ well being and security code, which grants mother and father full and unrestricted entry to their kids’s medical information.
Epic has responded by saying it doesn’t decide parental entry to kids’s information, as these selections are made by particular person well being programs and suppliers.
How is Epic responding?
Epic is just not admitting to any wrongdoing, an organization spokesperson stated in an electronic mail despatched to MedCity Information.
“The motion taken by Texas is flawed and misguided by its failure to know each Epic’s enterprise mannequin and place out there and the large contributions our firm has made to our nation’s healthcare system illustrated by merchandise like MyChart — software program that tens of thousands and thousands of People rely upon every single day,” the spokesperson said.
Additionally they famous that Epic facilitates greater than 725 million well being file exchanges every month, which is far more than some other EHR vendor.
Hasn’t one thing like this occurred earlier than?
That is definitely not the primary time Epic has been criticized for blocking the free circulate of well being information. In reality, the corporate is presently embroiled in a yearslong legal battle with information platform Particle Health.
Following months of dispute, Particle filed an antitrust lawsuit in opposition to Epic final 12 months, alleging that the corporate wielded its dominant market stance to make competitors not possible within the payer platform house.
Epic has denied wrongdoing on this case as effectively — however in September, a federal decide advanced the lawsuit, marking the primary time antitrust allegations in opposition to the EHR big have gotten this far.
The following step is the invention part, which might shed new mild on how information sharing guidelines are enforced.
Photograph: NiroDesign, Getty Photos
