Epic Belatedly Accepts Reality And Drops Interoperability Fees

Unbeknownst to me, and perhaps some of you as well, Epic has been charging customers data usage fees for quite some time.  The EMR giant has been quietly dunning users 20 cents for each clinical message sent to a health information exchange and $2.35 for inbound messages from non-Epic users, fees which could surely mount up into the millions if across a substantial health system.  (The messages were delivered through an EMR module known as Care Everywhere.)

And now, Epic chose #HIMSS15 to announce grandly that it was no longer charging users any fees to share clinical data with organizations that don’t use its technology, at least until 2020, according to CEO Judy Faulkner.  In doing so, it has glossed over the fact that these questionable charges existed in the first place, apparently with some success. For an organization which has historically ducked the press routinely, Epic seems to have its eye on the PR ball.

To me, this announcement is troubling in several ways, including the following:

  • Charging fees of this kind smacks of a shakedown.  If a hospital or health system buys Epic, they can’t exactly back out of their hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars investment to ensure they can share data with outside organizations.
  • Forcing providers to pay fees to share data with non-Epic customers penalizes the customers for interoperability problems for which Epic itself is responsible. It may be legal but it sure ain’t kosher.
  • In a world where even existing Epic customers can’t share freely with other Epic customers, the vendor ought to be reinvesting these interoperability fees in making that happen. I see no signs that this is happening.
  • If Epic consciously makes it costly for health systems to share data, it can impact patient care both within and outside, arguably raising costs and increasing the odds of care mistakes. Doing so consciously seems less than ethical. After all, Epic has a 15% to 20% market share in both the hospital and ambulatory enterprise EMR sector, and any move it makes affects millions of patients.

But Epic’s leadership is unrepentant. In fact, it seems that Epic feels it’s being tremendously generous in letting the fees go.  Here’s Eric Helsher, Epic’s vice president of client success, as told to Becker’s Hospital Review: “We felt the fee was small and, in our opinion, fair and one of the least expensive…but it was confusing to our customers.”

Mr. Helsher, I submit that your customers understood the fees just fine, but balked at paying them — and for good reason. At this point in the history of clinical data networking, pay-as-you-go models make no sense, as they impose a large fluctuating expense on organizations already struggling to manage development and implementation costs.

But those of us, like myself, who stand amazed at the degree to which Epic blithely powers through criticism, may see the giant challenged someday. Members of Congress are beginning to “get it” about interoperability, and Epic is in their sights.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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