Epic’s Deep Space Auditorium during UGM 2024.
Courtesy: Epic Systems
This week, in an underground auditorium packed with thousands of healthcare executives, Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner took to the stage to deliver a keynote address wearing a swan, feathers and more.
Even by the tech industry’s more casual standards (with NVIDIA For example, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s signature leather jacket), Faulkner’s costumes may be confusing to first-time attendees. But for many healthcare industry veterans and Epic employees, it’s business as usual — marking the official start of Epic’s annual user group meeting. At the healthcare company’s event on Tuesday, one theme stood out: how new artificial intelligence capabilities can help doctors and patients.
Epic is a healthcare software giant whose technology is used by thousands of hospitals and clinics across the United States. The company maintains the medical records of more than 280 million people in the United States, although patient information is often stored among multiple vendors.
wizard and animals
Every year, thousands of people come to Epic’s headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin, to learn about its latest products and initiatives. UGM is one of the company’s largest annual campus events, and CNBC joined Tuesday’s festivities.
Epic’s 1,670-acre campus is dotted with farm animals, wizard statues and buildings with themes such as “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Fittingly, this year’s conference was themed “Story Time,” with Faulkner and other Epic executives speaking as characters dressed up as characters inspired by various children’s books.
They shared updates on key Epic products, including sketches and jingles, including MyChart, an app that patients can use to access their medical records, and Cosmos, a de-identified patient dataset that clinicians can use to conduct research. and other products.
Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of R&D, spoke at UGM 2024.
Courtesy: Epic Systems
Epic’s Artificial Intelligence Announcement
Many of Epic’s announcements have centered around how the company is integrating artificial intelligence into these products. Faulkner said the company is developing more than 100 AI capabilities, although many tools are still in the early stages of development.
For example, Epic said that by the end of this year, its generative artificial intelligence will help doctors modify information responses, letters and instructions into simple language that patients can understand. Doctors will be able to use artificial intelligence to automatically queue prescriptions and lab orders, the company said.
Many doctors must perform time-consuming tasks, such as drafting insurance denial appeal letters and reviewing prior authorization requirements, so Epic said it is working this year to launch artificial intelligence tools that can streamline these processes.
By the end of 2025, Epic’s generative artificial intelligence will be able to pull results, medications and other details doctors may need when responding to patient messages through MyChart, the company said. Other specific features, such as using artificial intelligence to calculate wound measurements from images, will also be launched next year.
Epic has announced plans to launch a new staff scheduling app called “Teamwork” for doctors and nurses, which will launch soon. Additionally, Faulkner said Epic is “looking into” ways to facilitate claim submissions directly through its software without the need for a middleman like a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could mark a major change in how insurance claims are processed throughout the health care industry.
Whether these features will all be implemented, and whether health systems will actually use them, is unclear. Even so, Epic ended its presentation on Tuesday with a great demo of where the company sees its technology going.
future
Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, hosted the presentation. He spoke with an AI agent via the MyChart app about his recovery from a so-called wrist surgery and answered questions about his pain. Agents instructed Hayne to turn on the camera and bend his wrist back so he could assess his recovery progress. The agent said Hayne’s wrist extension was about 60 to 75 degrees, meaning his recovery was ahead of schedule compared with data from similar patients in the Epic Cosmos database.
Hayne asked his agent if he could start playing pickleball again, and his agent told him “it should wait a little longer.”
In a meeting with reporters after the demonstration, Hayne said the demonstration was conducted on the fly without human intervention. However, the feature is so new that Epic hasn’t even named it yet, and Hain said it could be several years before it becomes more widely available.
“It’s still very, very, very early days in terms of how and where the community, the broader medical community can adopt this type of thing, but it is feasible,” he said.
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