The electronic health record company Epic offers financial incentives to healthcare systems that use its proprietary algorithms — and those algorithms can deliver inaccurate predictions, a Stat News investigation found.
Epic is the largest electronic health record company in the United States, and it holds the health records for around 250 million people. The company has around 20 algorithms designed to predict things like how long a patient might stay in the hospital, which patients might become seriously ill, and which might develop a deadly condition called sepsis.
Like many other groups that build health algorithms, Epic doesn’t publicly share details of how the algorithms are built. Researchers at hospitals that use Epic are able...
