The news: Electronic health record (EHR) giant Epic is being sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who alleges the company blocks competition and restricts access to patient health data.

Digging into the details: The antitrust lawsuit accuses Epic of controlling which hospitals and patients can access and share its EHR data and stifling competition from other software vendors.

• Provider organizations that aren’t customers of Epic are denied or delayed the ability to retrieve its patient records, the lawsuit alleges.
• It claims Epic imposes “massive penalty fees” on hospitals that attempt to use competitors’ solutions that rely on hospitals' EHR data.
• Per the lawsuit, patient healthcare suffers since a patient’s preferred physician might receive incomplete or out-of-date medical records without access to Epic’s EHR data.

It’s worth noting that this lawsuit grew out of Paxton’s broader legal fights over gender-transition care for minors and parental access to details about their children’s treatment, per the WSJ. Paxton claims that Epic “automatically hides” children’s medication lists, treatment notes, and doctors’ messages from parents when their child turns 12 years old.

Why it matters: Epic is the dominant player in the hospital EHR market, holding roughly 325 million patient records.

Epic has dealt with previous lawsuits over similar claims that the company uses its market power to limit patient data access and sideline competitors. But this legal action is the biggest antitrust challenge Epic has faced to date, according to health tech expert and HTD Health executive Brendan Keeler. For its part, Epic has long attested that healthcare organizations using other EHRs still have visibility into patient medical records stored in Epic.

Implications for the health tech market: The lawsuit adds to recent public and private sector signals that call for hospitals and patients to have better access to health data. While Paxton might have motives outside of the health tech realm—like banning gender-affirming care among young people—the lawsuit’s outcome could open the market to more Big Tech and digital health/AI players to create solutions that strengthen consumers’ and providers’ ability to access and share medical data across entities.

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