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Epic Systems has responded to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's claims that it uses deceptive and anticompetitive practices to restrict patient data access, allegations leveled in the lawsuit he filed last month.
The electronic health record giant is pushing back on the validity of accusations that its practices are anticompetitive.
"The State’s claims are barred, in whole or in part, because the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act does not apply to the alleged transactions or contracts between Epic and its Customers," Epic attorneys said in its list of affirmative defenses.
Epic denies restricting patient access
Paxton alleges that Epic has violated the state's health and safety code and is "gatekeeping data and restricting parental access to children’s medical records."
Epic's first assertion addressed Paxton's claims that the EHR automatically hides children's medication lists from parents, citing its health provider customers as the legal custodians of medical records and the arbiters of who has access to certain patient health data.
"Epic makes highly configurable software so that its customers, healthcare organizations across all fifty states, can determine what workflows and functionalities are needed to achieve their own compliance obligations – including with respect to parental access rights to medical records," the EHR vendor said in a copy of the statement shared with Healthcare IT News this week.
No mention of noncompliance
The 26-page statement offers 29 total affirmative defenses explaining why Epic should not be a defendant in the suit.
The company noted that it was never cited for compliance violations, for instance, pointing out that its software is configurable for compliance with state laws, which vary significantly across the U.S.
"The state never identified a single alleged instance of reported noncompliance," the company said. "And in its petition, there is no mention of a single instance of noncompliance by any Epic customer, let alone one that resulted in parents being denied access to their child’s records."
Epic said that despite a six-month investigation, the state failed to identify a single instance where a parent was actually denied access to records because of its software:
"That is made clear by the fact that even after that six-month investigation, the petition relies heavily on dated, biased press articles and blog posts, and copies a different plaintiff’s unproven factual allegations from a complaint in a separate private lawsuit that Epic has moved to dismiss in its entirety."
Highlighting interoperability
Epic also denied harboring data and cited its interoperability leadership – customers execute more than 725 million medical record exchanges per month, more than half of them with non-Epic systems, the company noted.
With a public library containing more than 500 APIs and more than 1,500 third-party apps exchanging data using the free tools, Epic touted its leadership on interoperability.
It's a founding member of the Carequality health information exchange network and an early participant in the growing 2-year-old federal health data interoperability network under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, the EHR vendor noted.
The company said it also provided Texas customers with a specific software guide to comply with the 2025 Texas laws before they went into effect.
Further, Epic justified its API fees, stating that more than 99% of third-party API transactions fall into the lowest price categories, including its $0 tier, and denied requiring customers to use new products.
"Epic denies each and every, all and singular, of the allegations made and contained in the Petition and demands strict proof thereof," the company said in its general denial.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
