Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Epic this week, alleging that the company is monopolizing the EHR market and restricting patients’ access to their own medical data.
Epic’s EHR systems are installed in more than 3,600 hospitals in the U.S., giving the company roughly 42% of the acute care hospital EHR market — far more than any competitor like Oracle Cerner or Meditech. The Verona, Wisconsin-based company generated $5.7 billion in revenue last year.
The lawsuit not only claims that Epic uses its dominant position to stifle competition, but also that it blocks parents’ access to their children’s medical records once they reach a certain age.
“We will not allow woke corporations to undermine the sacred rights of parents to protect and oversee their kids’ medical well-being,” Paxton said in a statement. “This lawsuit aims to ensure that Texans can readily obtain access to these records and benefit from the lower costs and innovation that come from a truly competitive electronic health records market.”
Epic has denied the allegations, calling them misguided.
What is being alleged?
The complaint, filed Wednesday, argues that Epic leverages its market dominance to prevent hospitals from moving to competing EHR systems — and that this practice has effectively shut out rival vendors for decades.
“Epic controls who can access this data, when they can access it, and the terms by which they can access it — despite the simple fact that it is the hospitals’ and patients’ data, not Epic’s,” the lawsuit reads.
Essentially, Paxton alleges that Epic unlawfully restricts or delays providers’ access to patient records when they use non-Epic systems, therefore hindering the flow of critical medical information and potentially postponing care.
His lawsuit also highlights Epic’s use of noncompete agreements, saying that these limit other companies’ ability to hire top talent. As recently as 2019, these agreements prohibited former Epic employees from working for thousands of healthcare software firms during their noncompete period, according to the complaint.
How does the parent angle fit into this?
Paxton sees this lawsuit not only as a move to uphold the free market, but also as a continuation of his efforts to protect parents’ access to their children’s medical records.
In October, his office settled with an Austin-based clinic after its patient record system allegedly locked parents out of their children’s accounts once they turned 12.
Paxton’s office is claiming that Epic hides health data from parents once the child turns 12, saying that this violates Texas’ health and safety code, which grants parents complete and unrestricted access to their children’s medical records.
Epic has responded by saying it does not determine parental access to children’s records, as these decisions are made by individual health systems and providers.
How is Epic responding?
Epic is not admitting to any wrongdoing, a company spokesperson said in an email sent to MedCity News.
“The action taken by Texas is flawed and misguided by its failure to understand both Epic’s business model and position in the market and the enormous contributions our company has made to our nation’s healthcare system illustrated by products like MyChart — software that tens of millions of Americans depend on every day,” the spokesperson stated.
They also noted that Epic facilitates more than 725 million health record exchanges each month, which is much more than any other EHR vendor.
Hasn’t something like this happened before?
This is certainly not the first time Epic has been criticized for blocking the free flow of health data. In fact, the company is currently embroiled in a yearslong legal battle with data platform Particle Health.
Following months of dispute, Particle filed an antitrust lawsuit against Epic last year, alleging that the company wielded its dominant market stance to make competition impossible in the payer platform space.
Epic has denied wrongdoing in this case as well — but in September, a federal judge advanced the lawsuit, marking the first time antitrust allegations against the EHR giant have gotten this far.
The next step is the discovery phase, which could shed new light on how data sharing rules are enforced.
Photo: NiroDesign, Getty Images
