Over the weekend, a federal choose issued a big ruling in Particle Health’s antitrust lawsuit in opposition to Epic, permitting key claims to proceed whereas dismissing others.
Choose Naomi Buchwald of the Southern District of New York permitted three of Particle’s federal antitrust claims to maneuver ahead, in addition to a declare of tortious interference with enterprise contracts.
Information platform Particle filed the lawsuit in opposition to EHR behemoth Epic final September following a monthslong dispute. The startup’s grievance alleged that the EHR vendor is utilizing its dominance out there to stop competitors within the payer platform area.
The payer platform area refers back to the rising marketplace for digital platforms that permit payers to entry and analyze affected person information at scale for quite a lot of functions, together with bettering care coordination, designing inhabitants well being applications or streamlining claims processing.
Particle’s grievance alleges that Epic is stopping the startup from competing on this area by blocking Particle prospects from retrieving Epic-held information.
On the heart of the dispute is Carequality, a nationwide information trade framework that Epic performs a dominant function in working. Particle depends on Carequality to retrieve affected person information on behalf of its prospects, however the startup alleges that Epic has selectively restricted its entry, subsequently reducing it off from a vital pipeline of scientific information.
Particle argues that Epic has leveraged its affect over Carequality to tilt the market in its favor and shut out the competitors — saying that this conduct quantities to an “unprecedented” exertion of market energy that suppresses innovation and controls payers’ entry to affected person information. The corporate alleges that Epic’s ways have pushed prospects to desert their contracts, as effectively stop new buyer relationships from forming.
In her September 5 ruling, Buchwald stated that Particle had offered credible info to again up its claims that Epic engaged in anticompetitive conduct — sufficient to keep away from the case’s outright dismissal at this preliminary stage. She did, nonetheless, dismiss a number of claims alleging that Epic engaged in conspiracy, defamation and commerce libel.
Particle CEO Jason Prestinario stated he’s “more than happy” about Buchwald’s ruling in a LinkedIn post.
“Whereas just a few of the claims didn’t survive, Epic’s movement to dismiss was DENIED on all 3 of the core monopolization antitrust claims. That is the primary time in Epic’s historical past that an antitrust case in opposition to them has gotten up to now. It’s the subsequent step to a much bigger victory for higher affected person care and extra affected person management of their medical information,” he wrote.
An Epic spokesperson despatched a press release to MedCity Information noting that the corporate is wanting ahead to the subsequent stage of the authorized course of.
“The Courtroom dismissed the vast majority of Particle’s claims. The ruling included the remark that Carequality’s ‘imposition of the corrective motion plan [on Particle] was fully cheap.’ Epic has labored and can proceed to work to guard the privateness of sufferers’ information. We stay up for the chance to current proof to prevail on the remaining claims,” the spokesperson wrote.
The following step for the events is the invention part, which may shed new mild on how information sharing guidelines are enforced and what’s at stake for the way forward for payer platforms.
Picture: Andrii Sedykh, Getty Photos
