What to know before relying on an Epieme record.
- Sources. Epieme indexes public records from official government, licensing, court, legislative, and petition sources. Coverage is documented per source and per state.
- Updates. Update cadence varies by source. Each source card lists cadence, last pulled date, and known gaps.
- Limits. Epieme does not claim complete national coverage, does not publish protected health information, and does not score or rank hospitals.
- Corrections. Anyone can report an error. Epieme targets a first response within 5 business days and publishes dispositions in a corrections log.
Public records should stay attached to every summary.
Epieme is a civic intelligence project for patient-safety public records. It helps patients, journalists, regulators, researchers, attorneys, hospital quality officers, and advocates locate records faster without losing sight of the source of truth.
What Epieme is
A source-linked index for public patient-safety records, credentialing signals, legislation, and related civic context.
What Epieme is not
Not medical advice, not legal advice, not a hospital quality score, not a substitute for clinical review, and not the official source.
The summary is useful only when the official record remains one click away.
Operational terms are defined before they are marketed.
- Source-linked
- A record includes a direct path to the public source used for the claim.
- Public record
- A record lawfully available from a public agency, court, board, legislature, or public filing system.
- Derived claim
- A claim produced by joining two or more records. It must show the join logic.
- Protected health information
- Individually identifiable health information protected by HIPAA or state privacy law. Epieme will not publish raw PHI.
- FOIA / public-records request
- A request to a public body for records under federal or state access laws.
Every source gets the same disclosure fields.
Source cards use the same fields so readers can compare coverage without guessing what is current, licensed, partial, or not yet published.
State adverse-event reports
Incident reports hospitals file with state health departments. Reporting rules vary; voluntary systems undercount.
- Cadence
- Varies by state
- Last pulled
- Not published yet
Medical board actions
Disciplinary and licensing actions from state boards. Names, dates, and categories differ by board.
- Cadence
- Weekly or monthly where available
- Last pulled
- Not published yet
Patient-safety legislation
Bills, statuses, and sponsors from state legislative sources. Bill text can lag status changes.
- Cadence
- Daily during legislative sessions
- Last pulled
- Not published yet
Public petitions and testimony
Petition pages, hearings, and public comments. May include advocacy framing; needs source separation.
- Cadence
- Source-dependent
- Last pulled
- Not published yet
Technical source fields
Each per-source page should include: source owner, retrieval method, schema mapping, retry policy, parser version, validation checks, terms-of-use note, known missing fields, and contact path for the source owner.
Per-source pages
Source methodology pages will live at stable URLs such as
/methodology/sources/cms-care-compare and
/methodology/sources/maine-medical-board. Until
those pages are live, Epieme does not imply complete source
documentation.
Per-state methodology
Each state page will disclose coverage, source mix, statutory context, FOIA status, known gaps, public-records request log, and last review date.
Records move through five documented gates.
The diagram is a map, not the methodology itself. Each gate links to a source-level or state-level method page as those pages become available.
- 01 SourceOfficial record, FOIA response, or public filing.
- 02 IngestPull, archive, checksum, and log retrieval.
- 03 NormalizeMap names, dates, locations, categories.
- 04 VerifyClassify confidence and preserve source link.
- 05 PublishShow record with limits, date, and correction path.
Ingest
Epieme records where each source came from and when it was retrieved. Retrieval logs include URL, timestamp, parser version, status code, checksum, and source owner.
Normalize
Epieme makes records comparable without changing what the source says. Normalized fields preserve raw values and transformation notes.
Publish
The published record shows the source, date, confidence tier, and correction link. Publication is versioned so prior displays can be reproduced.
Every claim needs a confidence tier.
Epieme never asks readers to trust a conclusion without showing whether it is directly verified, derived from joined records, or still unresolved.
- Verified incident
- A record linked to a primary public source with matching facility, date or date range, jurisdiction, and document owner.
- Credentialing red flag
- A record that needs source-specific review before Epieme uses it in product copy.
- Human review reliability
- Human review metrics are not published yet. Epieme will publish reliability measures once a reviewed corpus is available.
- No rankings
- Epieme does not score or rank hospitals. It surfaces records, source links, confidence tiers, and known limitations.
Validation checks for each record
- Source URL resolves and is archived where lawful.
- Source owner matches the jurisdiction and record type.
- Extracted dates can be traced to the raw document.
- Classifier outputs retain a confidence tier and version.
- Corrections retain prior display and disposition.
Known gaps are part of the record.
- State variance. FOIA laws, adverse-event definitions, disciplinary reporting, and publication practices differ by state.
- Underreporting. Voluntary systems can miss events. Epieme will not present absence of records as absence of risk.
- Adjacent data. Malpractice payouts, peer review, clinical outcomes, and sealed settlements are outside the current perimeter unless a public source is documented.
- U.S.-only. International expansion is not part of v0.9. If added, it will be documented under a future major version.
This page states what Epieme will not publish.
- HIPAA posture
- Epieme works with public records. It will not publish raw PHI, private medical records, or identifiers that are not already lawfully public and necessary for the record.
- What Epieme will not publish
- Raw PHI, private patient narratives without permission, sealed records, peer-review protected material, or content obtained outside lawful access channels.
- Subject access
- Providers or facilities disputing a record can request review. The correction path preserves the original source and publishes the disposition.
- Legal pages
- Privacy, terms, data use, acceptable use, and DMCA pages will be linked from this section as they are finalized. Privacy is currently available.
Mistakes need a public path, not a private inbox.
First response within 5 business days. Final dispositions state whether the record was corrected, annotated, removed, or left unchanged.
Report an errorPublic corrections log
A dated feed with record ID, summary, change type, and disposition.
Fixed mistake example
This space is reserved for real corrected errors after launch.
Takedown policy
Documents unlawful, sealed, misattributed, or privacy-sensitive takedown criteria.
Hospitals cannot pay to change a listing.
Funding and conflicts need to be visible before procurement, reporters, or public agencies ask for them.
- Funding disclosure
- Accelerator support, grants, contracts, customer revenue, and the date each disclosure was updated.
- Funder firewall
- Hospitals, vendors, funders, and advertisers cannot pay to change methodology, suppress records, alter rankings, or edit source-linked displays.
- Conflicts of interest
- Any family, advisory, research, hospital, legal, or institutional relationships relevant to coverage are listed.
- Advertising policy
- Epieme does not sell hospital advertising against public patient-safety listings.
Methodology changes have a named owner.
Current methodology owner
Samson Cournane. Founder biography, institutional roles, and conflict disclosures remain current and verifiable.
External review
No independent methodology audit is published yet. When a review is complete, this page will name the reviewer and link to the write-up.
Advisory board
Epieme does not imply an advisory board before it exists. Named advisors are listed only with permission, expertise, and conflict disclosures.
Questions procurement and reporters ask first.
Does Epieme claim complete national coverage?
No. Coverage is source-specific, state-specific, and versioned. Unknown coverage is labeled as unknown or not published.
Does Epieme score or rank hospitals?
No. Epieme surfaces public records, source links, confidence tiers, and known limitations.
Does Epieme publish protected health information?
No. Epieme will not publish raw PHI or private medical records.
How are errors corrected?
Report a record or section error. Epieme targets first response within 5 business days and publishes dispositions.
Can a hospital pay to change a listing?
No. Payments, contracts, donations, or partnerships cannot alter source-linked records or methodology decisions.
Can researchers use Epieme data?
Public slices, commercial API terms, and data-sharing agreements need final license language before release.
Who owns this methodology?
Current owner: Samson Cournane. External reviewers are named only after they are confirmed.
Different questions need different response paths.
- Methodology methodology@epieme.org
- Press press@epieme.org
- Research research@epieme.org
- Partnerships partnerships@epieme.org
Contact aliases point to monitored inboxes with published response windows before launch. Press contact will include a phone number or same-day escalation path.