Recent AI tools are coming to MyChart, Cosmos

In an underground auditorium filled with hundreds of health-care executives this week, Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner stepped on stage to deliver a keynote dressed like a swan, feathers and all.

Even by the tech industry’s more casual standards (take Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s trademark leather jacket, as an illustration), Faulkner’s costume can have puzzled some first-time attendees. But for a lot of health-care industry veterans and Epic employees, it was business as usual— an indication that Epic’s annual Users Group Meeting was officially underway. And one theme stood out in the course of the health-care company’s event on Tuesday: How latest artificial intelligence features might help doctors and patients.

Epic is a health-care software giant whose technology is utilized in hundreds of U.S. hospitals and clinics. The corporate houses medical records for greater than 280 million individuals within the U.S., though patients often have data stored across multiple vendors.  

Wizards and animals

Annually, hundreds of individuals descend on Epic’s headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin to listen to about its latest products and initiatives. UGM is considered one of the corporate’s largest annual on-campus events, and CNBC attended the festivities on Tuesday.

Epic’s 1,670-acre campus is sprinkled with cattle, statues of wizards and buildings themed like “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Fittingly, this yr’s conference is “storytime” themed, and Faulkner and other Epic executives spoke while dressed as characters inspired by various kid’s books.

There was no shortage of skits and jingles as they shared updates across Epic’s major products, including its offerings like MyChart, an app patients can use to access their medical records, and Cosmos, a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct research.

Epic’s Artificial Intelligence announcements

A lot of Epic’s announcements centered around how the corporate is integrating artificial intelligence into these products. Faulkner said the corporate has greater than 100 AI features within the works, though lots of the tools are still within the early stages of development.

For example, by the top of this yr, Epic said its generative AI will help doctors revise message responses, letters and directions into plain language that patients can understand. Doctors will give you the chance to make use of AI to mechanically queue up orders for prescriptions and labs, the corporate said.

Many physicians need to perform time-consuming tasks like drafting insurance denial appeal letters and reviewing prior authorization requirements, so Epic said it’s working to introduce AI tools that may streamline those processes this yr.

By the top of 2025, Epic’s generative AI will give you the chance to drag in the outcomes, medications and other details that a health care provider might need when responding to a patient’s message through MyChart, the corporate said. Other specific functions, like using AI to calculate wound measurements from images, are also coming next yr.

Epic announced plans for a latest staff scheduling application for physicians and nurses called “Teamwork” that is coming soon. Moreover, Faulkner said Epic is “investigating” the way it could facilitate claims submissions directly through its software, without the necessity for a middleman like a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could mark a serious change in the way in which that insurance claims are processed throughout the health-care industry.

Whether these features will all come to fruition — and whether health systems will actually use them — is not yet known. Even so, Epic closed its presentation Tuesday by showcasing a lofty demo about where the corporate believes its technology can go.

The longer term

Seth Hain, senior vp of research and development at Epic, facilitated the demo. He spoke to an AI agent through the MyChart app about his recovery after a supposed wrist surgery and answered questions on his pain. The agent instructed Hain to open his camera and bend his wrist back so it could evaluate the progress of his healing. The agent said Hain’s wrist extension was about 60 to 75 degrees, which meant his recovery was ahead of schedule, in comparison with data from similar patients in Epic’s Cosmos database.

Hain asked the agent if he could start playing pickleball again, and it told him that he “should still wait a bit longer” before doing so.

In a gathering with reporters after the presentation, Hain said the demo was happening in real-time without human intervention. Nonetheless, that capability is so latest that Epic doesn’t also have a name for it yet, and Hain said it should likely be a couple of years before it’s more widely available.

“It is vitally, very, very early with reference to how and where the community, the broader medical community, will adopt that sort of thing, but it surely’s viable,” he said.