Becker's Hospital Review

48 CIO / HEALTH IT Judy Faulkner: 5 areas of focus for Epic By Laura Dyrda C NBC's Bertha Coombs interviewed Epic CEO Judy Faulkner during a vir- tual healthcare event on May 12 and asked about how the company has contributed to the COVID-19 response efforts and what to expect from the EHR giant in the future. "I think of our health systems as heroes," she said. "And we see our job as being heroes helping heroes, and we're proud of that." She said one of the big ways that Epic has been able to help its health system clients is through telehealth; many of its customers experienced a hundred-fold increase in telehealth. Ms. Faulkner said during the pandemic Epic has trained around 5,000 people on telehealth at around 200 health systems. Epic also has a COVID-19 dashboard that helps health sys- tems track test metrics and capacity. Ms. Faulkner also discussed a few projects Epic is working on for the future: 1. Epic has access to hundreds of millions of patient records and has spent time during the pandemic examining whether medica- tions are effective to treat COVID-19. She said the company has looked at around 30 medications to see if any of them would protect patients exposed to COVID-19; so far, none of the medications have panned out. e company is now looking at data on plasma therapy and remdesivir to figure out whether the treatments are effective for COVID-19 patients. Ms. Faulkner said the company is looking at other questions as well. "One of the real- ly interesting things that we're doing now is [examining] whether you can get it twice," she said. "We're looking at patients who had COVID, then got better, then did they have COVID again because clearly we want to see whether the antibodies are protective." 2. Artificial intelligence has always been part of the Epic EHR to some degree, Ms. Faulk- ner said, and now the company is tackling the challenge of making sure AI and physicians can work together. "I think the more that we can help the physicians learn what AI does and the more that the physicians can help learn what the AI does, the better it's going to work together," she said. 3. e company is also planning to support health systems through a potential second surge of cases this fall and further into the fu- ture. e big questions that Epic is trying to tackle include: • What can prevent people from getting COVID-19? • What can save your life if you do get COVID-19? 4. Epic is participating in efforts to develop a smartphone marker that would report in real time whether the user has COVID-19 or not. e phone marker would indicate that the user has been tested and mark them as "safe" or "not safe." "We're working with a group that's doing that, and we said to them we'd like to do it for all our MyChart patients as well," said Ms. Faulkner. "We're putting that on MyChart so that [users] too will have that and you could go into a restaurant, show your signal to the people in the restaurant, and they'll know you're clear." 5. Epic has decided not to jump into contact tracing yet, at least partially due to the fact that half to two-third of Americans wouldn't participate. "We are watching the contact tracing and what people think of it," she said. "But right now our feeling is that with so many people feeling it isn't the right thing to do, that it becomes too invasive. Right now we are not going forward with that." n What HIPAA rules are necessary for media crews in hospitals during the pandemic? 6 ORC clarifications By Laura Dyrda T he Office for Civil Rights issued guidance May 5 on HIPAA rules regarding media and film crews in their facilities during the pandemic. Six details: 1. HHS previously relaxed enforcing some HIPAA regula- tions during the pandemic to promote information sharing between healthcare organizations and public health offi- cials. However, the relaxed guidelines do not change HI- PAA's regulations around media coverage. 2. Healthcare providers must still obtain valid HIPAA autho- rization for each patient whose protected health informa- tion is accessible to the media before media members are able to access the information. 3. It is not sufficient to mask or obscure patients' faces or identifying information before broadcasting a recording of the patient, according to the ORC guidance. Providers must still obtain HIPAA authorization prior to media access. 4. Healthcare providers can't require a patient to sign HI- PAA authorization as a condition of treatment. 5. Media crews can film an interview with a healthcare pro- vider in areas where patients' PHI is accessible if every pa- tient who is or will be in the area or accessible to the media signs a valid HIPAA authorization. 6. Healthcare providers are also required to maintain the same level of protection for patient privacy when the me- dia has access to their facilities, even to shoot B-roll film, as before the pandemic. The safeguards could include install- ing computer monitor privacy screens and setting opaque barriers to block the film crews from PHI for patients who do not sign HIPAA authorizations. n

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