eDiscovery Collection for Epic Systems

Malpractice Litigation

Produce full encounter histories, clinician notes, and audit trails to reconstruct the standard of care timeline.

False Claims & Stark Law Audits

Correlate professional billing (Resolute Professional) with clinical documentation (progress notes, orders).

Employment Disputes

Retrieve secure chats (Epic Chat/Buzz) and in‑basket messages between clinical staff.

M&A Diligence

Validate quality metrics, patient demographics, and revenue cycle KPIs via Clarity extracts.

The Epic Platform

Epic’s architecture centers on two proprietary data stores:

Modern interoperability relies on FHIR R4 / Bulk FHIR APIs, HL7 v2, and C‑CDA documents, while the Care Everywhere network facilitates cross‑organization record exchange.

Extracting Epic Data for Investigation​

Method What you get Typical Volume Pro Tips
Clarity DW Queries (SQL) Daily snapshots of most Chronicles tables High (TB‑scale) Filter by contact_date, pat_id; join to CLARITY_SER for provider attribution.
Caboodle / Cogito Data Warehouse Curated, de‑normalized views with Slicer‑Dicer lineage High Good for cohorts; preserve ETL run date.
Report Workbench / Radar Exports User‑generated CSV, XLSX, or PDF reports Low‑Medium Capture template ID & run parameters for reproducibility.
Bulk FHIR Export (/$export) NDJSON files per resource type (Patient, Encounter, Observation…) Variable Requires Epic admin enablement; include $since cursor for incremental pulls.
C‑CDA Continuity of Care Docs XML documents for each encounter or patient summary Low Validate against XSD; hash embedded binaries (labs, imaging).
Chronicles Read APIs / Chronicles Direct Real‑time reads from operational DB Low Use sparingly; impairs production performance—schedule during off‑peak hours.
Care Everywhere Query Log Audit of outbound/inbound HIE requests Low Useful for tracing record‑sharing events in breach investigations.

“Being able to filter and sift through these records so efficiently is an absolute game changer.”

Happy Attorney
Big Law Firm

Company Snapshot

Epic Systems Corporation is a privately‑held electronic health record (EHR) vendor headquartered in Verona, Wisconsin. Epic software is deployed at ≈ 39 % of U.S. acute‑care hospitals—the largest market share of any EHR—and stores medical records for an estimated 260 million patients.

Origin

Epic was founded in 1979 by computer programmer Judith “Judy” Faulkner in the basement of a Madison apartment using a $6,000 CDC 6600 mini‑computer loan. The company—originally named Human Services Computing—released its first patient‑database product in 1983 and has remained founder‑led and employee‑owned, emphasizing long‑term R&D over quarterly results.

Preservation Tip: Chronicles retains full version history for most clinical objects; however, some flowsheet rows and audit tables may be purged based on retention settings (< 18 months default). Issue a legal hold and request Chronicles Journal Archives or copy to a sandbox environment.

Related Epic Technologies