If you have a primary care physician, chances are you have MyChart, which seems to have a monopoly on the online medical records portal business. Oddly enough, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has noticed that monopoly as well.
Texas is suing the electronic medical records conglomerate that owns the MyChart system, Epic Systems, alleging that it both has a monopoly on the industry and makes it difficult for parents to access their children’s medical records.
The antitrust lawsuit was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on December 10 in Tarrant County district court. It accused Epic of “inserting” itself as the “gatekeeper” of patient data, by “locking up” hospitals into its electronic health records (EHR) systems, then dictating when and which individuals can access said data.
As described on the Epic Systems website, the company has “more than 325 million patients” with electronic records. Both major Texas medical networks and hospitals — such as Texas Children’s Hospital and Memorial Hermann — and smaller clinics use Epic’s various services, including MyChart.
It represents more than 90 percent of all U.S. citizens, court documents note.
The suit similarly highlights that Epic houses more than 325 million patients’ medical records within its databases, stating that its “strategy” has been “inordinately successful” and has operated as a monopoly in the EHR industry.
My health provider uses MyChart, but I’ve never consented for them to use it for me. Call me paranoid, but I believe that ObamaCare incentivized newly cartelized medical providers to centralize record keeping so the federal government could suck in all that information for themselves, because that’s the sort of thing socialists love to have on file as a weapon to use against the proles. Naturally, I’m agin it…
Tags: Ken Paxton, Lawsuit, ObamaCare, Texas
Last I heard, MyChart only worked with Epic’s electronic medical records. They may have added support for some other providers, but standardizing records for a field where precise shades of distinction can be the difference between life and death is probably intractable.
This probably isn’t due to wokeness; setting sufficient security and access is always a chore.
Granted, Epic is almost certainly as woke as they come. During the passage of Obamacare, their CEO insisted that cutting medicaid to hospitals that didn’t use electronic medical records was a worthy incentive. They also pointed to high infant mortality statistics in the US as a reason to move to single-payer, without even mentioning that the statistics they cited specifically said that reporting requirements vary so widely between countries that they should only be used to compare different years in a single country.
Come to think of it, the varying reporting requirements is related to the reason standardizing medical records between institutions is so difficult. Even if the US standardizes that statistic/measure across organizations, the reasons standards for that stat vary from country to country apply to other data in medical records, and not all of those are meaningfully standardized. The point being, Epic should’ve been on the vanguard arguing that the infant mortality stats weren’t actionable — or, at least, they should’ve been able to point out why the obvious objection wasn’t relevant. Instead, they just pushed the talking point.
The founder of Epic was a superbundler for Obama. CMS (Medicare) would delay mandates for electronic med records until Epic was ready for them. This happened repeatedly. Epic started as a hospital system and still sucks in the office.
We get paid for clicking, not taking care of the patient.
FU, Epic, Obama and Obamacare.
Hope Paxton wins. How the hell parents are kept from the records of their children is wrong. And children are up to 26 with Obamacare.