The Patriot Post® · Is Dallas Hospital's Ebola Response Linked to a Cover-Up?

Michelle Malkin: “A Dallas hospital’s bizarre bungle of the first U.S. case of Ebola leaves me wondering: Is someone covering up for a crony billionaire Obama donor and her controversy-plagued, taxpayer-subsidized electronic medical records company? … Texas Health contracts with Epic Systems for its electronic medical records system – and the Dallas hospital isn’t the only client that has complained about its costly information-sharing flaws and interoperability failures. Epic was founded by billionaire Judy Faulkner, a top Obama donor whose company is the dominant EMR player in the U.S. health care market. As I reported last year, Epic employees donated nearly $1 million to political parties and candidates between 1995 and 2012 – 82 percent of it to Democrats. The company’s Top 10 PAC recipients are all Democratic or leftwing outfits… Epic and other large firms lobbied aggressively for nearly $30 billion in federal subsidies for their companies under the 2009 Obama stimulus package. The law penalizes medical providers who fail to comply with the one-size-fits-all mandate. … Until recently, health care providers say, the company stubbornly refused to share data with doctors and hospitals using alternative platforms. Now, it charges exorbitant fees to enable the very kind of interoperability the Obama EMR mandate was supposed to ensure. … In July, The Boston Globe reported that there is still ‘no safety oversight of the vendors who sell’ EMR and EHR systems. One malpractice insurance group revealed that it found 147 cases ‘in which electronic health records contributed to "adverse events” that affected patients’ – 46 resulted in death. … The president-elect of the American Medical Association, Dr. Steven Stack, told Modern Healthcare magazine earlier this month that Epic’s software architecture ‘often leaves out key information and corrupts data in transit.’ Yikes. Imagine if some of that key data had to do with an Ebola carrier’s travel history. Oh, wait.“