Epic Systems is facing another legal battle as a healthcare company filed a lawsuit alleging anti-competitive practices and illegal interference in its business.

CureIS Healthcare, founded in 2006, offers technology and managed services for government programs like Medicare, Medicaid and state healthcare initiatives. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that Epic engaged in a multi-pronged “scheme to destroy” its business. Epic is the largest electronic health record software company in the U.S.

The company is represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, the same law firm representing health tech company Particle Health in its antitrust lawsuit against Epic.

The complaint (PDF) accuses Epic of exploiting its market power as the dominant provider of EHRs to eliminate competitors like CureIS in the managed care data reconciliation (MCDR) software market.

"Epic is feeding its need for more and more cash, even if it means depriving those in the most need of the best possible options for healthcare services, " the company wrote in its 40-page complaint. "This stranglehold enables Epic to eliminate perceived competitors and insulate itself from market-driven incentives to improve or innovate its own products, permanently lowering the bar for everyone."

"Epic believes in free and fair competition, and we also believe our customers are in the best position to choose the right solutions to meet their needs—whether with Epic or by adopting other products and services," an Epic spokesperson told Fierce Healthcaer in a statement. We are aware of the complaint filed by CureIS and we look forward to setting the record straight in court."

CureIS alleges that Epic’s "unfair and illegal conduct" hits managed care organizations particularly hard, because they "must make do with the least resources, but are still forced by Epic to pay bloated fees in exchange for mediocrity and ineptitude from Epic’s products and services," the company wrote in the complaint.

The company claims that Epic interfered with tis customer relationships, blocked its access to critical customer data, falsely advertised its own products as either matching or exceeding CureIS' capabilities and misappropriated CureIS’s proprietary information and trade secrets under the guise of integration discussions.

The complaint alleges that by leveraging its market dominance to impose an “Epic-first Policy,” Epic strong-armed customers to abandon CureIS solutions in favor of "subpar or nonexistent Epic alternatives," the company said.

"Epic exacerbates this problem for competitors like CureIS because Epic also has a practice of misrepresenting to customers that it either has plans to roll out a version of a competitor’s product soon, or that Epic has a current product that replicates the functionality of a competitor’s product, even though Epic’s products are typically of much lower quality," CureIS wrote in the complaint. "Both of these tactics prevent Epic’s EHR and RCM customers from utilizing third parties’ products, regardless of their preference."

The lawsuit seeks damages and injunctive relief. CureIS is bringing claims under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, Lanham Act, California’s unfair competition and false advertising laws, and for tortious interference with contractual relations and prospective economic advantage.

It's one more legal fight for the health IT behemoth.

Health tech company Particle filed an antitrust lawsuit against Epic in September in the Southern District of New York, alleging that the electronic health record giant is trying to muscle out competition. Particle is a data platform that aggregates health information for digital health companies through APIs, providing access to more than 300 million patients’ medical records. With a 36% market share of the hospital sector, EHR giant Epic is a dominant force in the health IT industry. 

Particle Health's 81-page lawsuit (PDF) alleges Epic engaged in monopolistic, anticompetitive practices, using its "power over EHRs to expand its dominance into the fledgling market for payer platforms," according to the lawsuit.

While CureIS is represented by the same law firm as Particle Health, iCureIS' case is much closer in form to Real Time Medical Systems v. PointClickCare as it uses information blocking along with state law, rather than antitrust, according to Brendan Keeler, interoperability and data liquidity practice lead at HTD Health.

In the RTMS v. PointClickCare case, a federal appeals court ruled that electronic health records company PointClickCare can't block health analytics firm RTMS from accessing patient data from its skilled nursing facility customers.

Keeler, a health IT expert who has been following the cases closely, said in a post on LinkedIn that the outcome of the CureIS-Epic lawsuit could have implications for all EHR vendors and ongoing friction with point solution vendors.

"The real solution for EHRs? Rapid reorientation towards headlessness, openness, and equal competition with third parties. It is a harder road and it is a cultural shift. But the headwinds are overwhelmingly strong in any other direction," Keeler wrote on LinkedIn.

CureIS claims that the "why" behind Epic’s alleged misconduct is clear. "Epic is nearing the saturation point in EHR software and needs to identify new areas for growth," the company wrote in its complaint.

The company said what initially seemed like one-off instances of friction with Epic were, in fact, part of a "widespread scheme by Epic to improperly interfere with CureIS’s business, as well as that of other providers of MCDR software."

CureIS points out that Epic has massive market power and alleges that the company is using its dominance in the market to stifle smaller innovators, which limits choices for healthcare organizations. Epic commands 42.3% of the acute care EHR market, according to KLAS Research. More than 325 million patients have a current electronic record in Epic, according to the health IT company.

“CureIS was founded to address the chronic inefficiencies plaguing government-managed care programs. Epic’s playbook—prioritizing market control over transparency, accountability, and performance—is philosophically antithetical to our mission," CureIS CEO Chris Sawotin said in a statement.