Epic said it will continue providing health system customers with AI transparency documentation and evaluation tools despite a recent federal rule eliminating certain disclosure requirements for certified electronic health records.
In an Oct. 30 LinkedIn post, the EHR vendor said it would maintain access to documentation and tools that help customers assess the fairness, validity and other characteristics of its software, even as the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology scales back federal oversight requirements.
“Epic is committed to meaningful AI transparency and health systems using Epic will retain access to all the tools we’ve created to help evaluate the fairness, validity, and other attributes of our software,” the company said in the post.
Epic also said it would continue providing customers with documentation that ONC no longer requires.
The statement follows an Oct. 26 final rule from HHS that eliminates 14 federal health IT certification criteria and revises seven others, including requirements involving AI transparency.
The rule, known as HTI-5, eliminates AI model-card requirements under the decision support interventions certification criterion. Those requirements, established under the Biden administration’s HTI-1 rule, were intended to give healthcare organizations information about predictive algorithms and other decision-support tools incorporated into certified health IT.
HHS said the changes are intended to reduce administrative burdens on health IT developers and allow companies to devote more resources to innovation and improving technology for clinicians and patients.
The agency estimates the rule will generate $1.55 billion in present-value regulatory cost savings, or $108.1 million in annualized net savings beginning in 2027.
Epic’s decision means its health system customers will continue to have access to existing AI evaluation resources even as federal certification requirements change. The company did not specify in the statement whether it would maintain every element of the previous federal disclosure requirements.
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