Texas AG sues Epic Systems

Texas Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton announced that he is suing Epic Systems for deceptive practices that undermine children’s healthcare and violate the state’s health and safety code. The electronic health record company is “gate­keep­ing data and restrict­ing parental access to children’s med­ical records,” he said on Thursday.

Epic denied limiting parents’ access to their children’s medical records.

WHY IT MATTERS

Epic “uses a wide range of exclusionary tactics to prevent potential competition from its partners, customers and even its own employees,” said Paxton in his announcement.

He alleged that the vendor controls data it does not own and automatically hides children’s medication lists, treatment notes and provider messages from parents when their children turn 12.

“Epic interferes with hospitals’ ability to use its own patient data as part of its scheme to block software competitors,” so doctors receive incomplete or out-of-date patient health information, diminishing the quality of healthcare, said Paxton.

“These anticompetitive practices further harm Texas hospitals and Texas patients by raising costs and blocking innovative technologies,” he added.

Epic says its database houses more than 325 million patient records, representing 90% of all U.S. citizens, and the company exchanges more than 725 million records every month.

“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,” an Epic spokesperson said by email on Friday.

“Health systems using Epic shared information with almost 1,000 patient-facing apps 2 billion times in the past year,” the spokesperson added.

THE LARGER TREND

Paxton has also issued civil investigative demands to other EHR vendors to ensure those companies follow Texas law and respect parental rights to access minors’ medical records, he said.

Earlier this year, Austin Diagnostic Clinic agreed to settle with the state and was required to restore parental proxy access for children aged 12 to 17, according to a statement.

Epic is also being sued by Particle Health in the Southern District of New York. The company filed its antitrust lawsuit in September 2024, after a six-month dispute over blocked data exchanges on the Carequality health information exchange network.

The EHR giant filed a motion to dismiss and claimed that the lawsuit was filed in retaliation for barring particular Particle clients from allegedly obtaining confidential patient records under pretenses, but New York Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald did not dismiss all claims in the lawsuit and it is moving forward.

Earlier this year, CureIS Healthcare, a managed care tech vendor, also filed a separate lawsuit against Epic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. That company claimed the EHR giant blocked access to necessary data and raised unfounded security concerns in an effort to squash its business.

ON THE RECORD

“We will not allow woke corporations to undermine the sacred rights of parents to protect and oversee their kids’ medical well-being,” said Paxton in the 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 does not determine parental access to children’s medical records,” the EHR vendor countered by email. “Decisions about parental access to children’s medical records are made by doctors and health systems, not by Epic.”

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.