Epic's software may slow down blind hospital workers, but it doesn't prevent them from doing their jobs, the EHR vendor said April 29 in response to a disability lawsuit, according to Politico's Morning eHealth newsletter.
Epic filed a motion to dismiss the complaint this week, arguing it has no legal standing, according to Politico. The lawsuit in question was filed in March by the National Federation of the Blind. The suit names Manuel Morse, a hospital dispatcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, whose work was allegedly slowed after an October 2018 software update broke the link between the EHR and the hospital's text-to-speech software. Mr. Morse previously sued Epic in 2017 over lack of interoperability between the EHR software and text-to-speech software.
The March complaint was the second iteration of a lawsuit filed against Epic in December. The original lawsuit claimed Epic and other EHR vendors' software isn't accessible to blind and low-vision users, therefore limiting job prospects. Epic said the complaint lacked standing because it didn't name an individual harmed by the software.
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