Epic Adds Smartphone App Capability for Patient EHR Access

Electronic Health Record (EHR) vendor Epic Systems announced that patients will be able to download their medical information to smartphone apps of their choice, giving them more control over their medical information. Patient access to digital medical information already exists through application programming interfaces (API), and Epic currently allows patients to access their own medical records through its MyChart tool. “Epic’s goal had always been that regardless of vendor, every patient’s data should be able to be shared, with the patient’s permission, wherever the patient went,” Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner wrote in her August 5, 2024 blog post.  

Epic is one of the seven Qualified Health Information Networks (QHINs) that has been helping the federal government establish the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement^TM (TEFCA^TM). This agreement defines the baseline legal and technical requirements for secure medical information sharing on a nationwide scale. Specifically, individual access services (IAC) is one of the “exchange purposes” under TEFCA^TM that promotes patient data sharing. The other exchange purposes include treatment, payment, healthcare operations, government benefits determination and public health.

As part of this capability, digital health apps can volunteer to agree to TEFCA^TM for secure data sharing guidelines and providing the technology to support these transactions. In addition, apps must follow the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rules, even if they are not legally mandated to do so. “This is the next really important step for a patient to be able to access their own information through an application of their choice to be able to participate more directly in their own health care,” said Micky Tripathi, assistant secretary for technology policy and national coordinator for health information technology at HHS.