Visitors attend UGM 2025.
Courtesy of Epic
Space travelers, robots and, after all, artificial intelligence.
They were all on display on Tuesday at Epic Systems’ annual Users Group Meeting, held on the health software giant’s 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin.
Judy Faulkner, Epic’s 82-year-old CEO, dressed for the occasion in a purple wig with neon green shoes and an iridescent vest, harking back to the fictional character Buzz Lightyear from the “Toy Story” franchise.
On the science fiction-themed event, Faulkner told the gang that Epic has roughly 200 different AI features in development that aim to help patients, clinicians and insurers.
“We’re combining the intelligence and curiosity of the human being with the investigative capabilities of gen AI,” Faulkner said, in front of 1000’s of health-care executives packed into an 11,400-seat underground auditorium.
Epic, certainly one of the biggest private technology corporations within the country, is best known for its electronic health record, or EHR, software. An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that is updated by doctors and nurses, and the technology is integral to the fashionable U.S. health-care system.
Epic’s software, which competes with Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), is utilized by 280 million Americans, based on the corporate. Many patients know of Epic due to its user portal called MyChart.
Last week, Epic announced MyChart Central, which is able to allow patients to log in to MyChart with only one set of credentials, somewhat than needing a username and password for every health system they visit. It’s equally helpful for health-care organizations, Faulkner said.
“You may spend less time handling patient calls and resetting passwords,” she said in her keynote on Tuesday. “Demographic changes like address must be added just once.”
A brand new addition to the MyChart portal is the always-on Emmie assistant, which the corporate said will give you the option to reply questions on lab results, propose appointment times and suggest relevant screenings that patients can confer with their doctor.
During Epic’s three-hour presentation, Faulkner and other executives introduced Emmie in addition to other AI assistants the corporate calls Art and Penny, highlighting latest capabilities which can be coming in the subsequent yr and beyond.
Health-care executives attend UGM 2025.
Courtesy of Epic
The Art assistant is meant for clinicians, and is supposed to act as an lively AI digital colleague, the corporate said. Art will give you the option to anticipate information that a health care provider might need, as an example, and might pull up information like blood pressure trends, update a patient’s family history and place orders.
The corporate also said Art will give you the option to draft clinical notes, which was probably the most highly anticipated announcements ahead of the conference. AI-powered clinical documentation tools, which are sometimes called AI scribes, can take notes on patient visits in real time as doctors record their encounters, with a patient’s consent.
AI scribes have exploded in popularity as health-care executives seek for solutions to assist reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads. Some startups within the space, including Abridge and Ambience Healthcare, have raised tons of of tens of millions of dollars from investors.
Epic said its AI charting tool is being inbuilt collaboration with Microsoft. Epic and Microsoft have been working closely together for roughly 20 years, and Microsoft’s DAX Copilot product is already a preferred offering throughout the AI scribing market.
“We’re proud to be collaborating with Epic to explore how we are able to bring our core Dragon ambient AI technology to Epic’s latest AI Charting capability to further improve care delivery,” Joe Petro, corporate vice chairman of Microsoft Health & Life Sciences said in a press release.
Epic’s Penny assistant is designed to assist with revenue cycle management and other administrative needs, reminiscent of generating appeal letters for insurance claims that get denied. It could also help speed up medical coding by serving up suggestions, Faulkner said. Those two features are already live.
“With all of the challenges health-care organizations are facing, we’d like to be certain our clinicians and our organizations are strong and doing well in an effort to give you the option to care for patients,” Faulkner said.
Epic closed out its executive address by teasing latest AI capabilities which can be coming to Cosmos, which is a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct research. Health systems must opt-in to take part in Cosmos, and the database currently includes information from greater than 1,760 hospitals and 300 million patients.
Epic said it’s constructing a set of proprietary foundation models, called Cosmos AI, based on this data. The corporate continues to be evaluating different applications of the models, and launched the Cosmos AI Lab to assist researchers and data scientists learn more.
Executives said the models could possibly be used to predict a timeline of a patient’s potential medical events, like whether they seem to be a readmission risk or could eventually experience a heart attack.
“We’re finding that it continues to enhance because it sees more patients,” said Seth Hain, a senior vice chairman of research and development at Epic. “Having only used 8 billion encounters thus far, we’re just getting began.”
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