by
Thomas Dworetzky, Contributing Reporter | April 20, 2016
There are a number of issues that complicate the seemingly straightforward case of a TCS worker wrongly accessing Epic information,
according to The Wire.
Kaiser licensed Epic's software in 2003, then brought in TCS in 2005, at which point Epic and TCS signed a consulting agreement in which TCS agreed that Epic's program held trade secrets that were protected. Then in 2011 Kaiser had TCS test Epic software, giving support for Epic releases, upgrades and maintenance, which it was agreed would happen at offshore sites in India.
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These sites were "required" to have data confidentiality protection like disabled USB ports, no email and no Internet access — but there were several machines at these sites, in fact, that did have enabled ports and email, called "kiosk machines".
TCS claimed these machines were disabled, but a TCS employee testimony revealed that they had both Internet access and working ports. This meant that TCS employees could "download release notes," which they used to make tests for Kaiser. This was, in effect, a workaround that violated the data security protocol that requires that information be gotten from Epic's web portal by its own employees or Kaiser personnel and then they would respond to TCS workers' requests.
In addition, one TCS employee had earlier legitimately had and used prior access rights to the Epic portal, gotten through his work on a previous project, and proceeded to use for the Kaiser project his old credentials to access the Epic site, download information onto a kiosk hard drive, and email it to himself, a violation of the user agreement with Epic. He then shared this information with other TCS workers.
The Epic claim is that the thousands of documents thus obtained, “contain detailed information on the features and functionalities of Epic’s software and database systems developed over thirty years." In addition, because some of the TCS employees who had access to these documents used them for a comparison study between Epic's software and TCS's Med Mantra. This was given to the Med Mantra developers.
TCS responded that these “were of the type necessary for work of the TCS testing team.”
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