Epic distancing itself from Google Cloud integrations

Epic is reportedly telling customers that it will not pursue further integrations with Google Cloud, according to a Jan. 17 CNBC report.

The EHR giant will instead focus on collaborations with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Over the past few weeks, Epic has been reaching out and calling its hospital clients that use Google Cloud for medical research and data storage, among other IT functions, people with knowledge of the situation told CNBC.

Epic declined to comment on Google specifically, but provided the following statement to CNBC regarding the company's decision process when choosing third-party partners.

"We invest substantial time and engineering effort in evaluating and understanding the infrastructure Epic runs on. Scalability, reliability and security are important factors we consider when evaluating these underlying technologies," said Seth Hain, Epic's vice president of research and development. 

Epic's move to distance itself from Google comes after news of the technology giant's partnership with St. Louis-based Ascension. Under the partnership, dubbed Project Nightingale, Ascension moved its EHR to Google Cloud and the tech giant gained access to data on millions of patients to help the company develop a search engine for EHRs. Privacy concerns arose when Ascension employees reported that patients and providers were unaware data was being shared with Google.

Google Health leader David Feinberg, MD, recently said the company is "super proud" of the partnership, despite the news. Google Cloud declined CNBC's request for comment.

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