EPIC Electronic Health Record impact on Federally Funded Human Research

The Care Everywhere feature in EPIC may be used to securely share patient records with healthcare providers at organizations on the Care Everywhere Network. The purpose is to coordinate and facilitate informed clinical care. 

However, the sharing practice may conflict with the protections afforded by a federal Certificate of Confidentiality (CoC). 

A CoC limits the release of research information beyond the authorized research team. While most research data is separate from clinical information, some sensitive material is accessible, which limits the CoC’s protections.  

This impacts most National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded projects, since NIH began automatically issuing CoCs in December 2016.

The EPIC team is continuing efforts to resolve this issue. In the interim, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has revised the CoC language in the informed consent templates and added language to the HIPAA Authorization to disclose that information may be shared with health care providers outside of UK with whom the participant has a treatment relationship. 

View the updated Informed Consent templates here.