Epic Systems Corp. is integrating artificial intelligence into its software at a dizzying pace, with about 100 projects designed to streamline health care for patients and doctors. In the future MyChart, Epic's popular patient portal, could help patients manage their overall health or give them personalized health care reminders.
The company is even testing a bot that would use MyChart to replace a doctor's visit in some cases. Epic leaders touched on a few of the new AI-generated features at its annual User Group Meeting in Wisconsin on Tuesday, when about 12,000 people packed the Deep Space Auditorium as part of the weeklong conference. An additional 32,000 people, including Epic employees and health care professionals around the world, tuned in to CEO Judy Faulkner's address to hear developments for the popular patient interface MyChart and clinic-facing programs.
"If you think we've done a lot of creative new things in the last years, well, hold on to your hats," Faulkner said. "You ain't seen nothing yet." For patients, AI is likely to reshape how they use MyChart in the coming years.
Instead of using it periodically to check in for appointments and pay invoices, Epic hopes patients will use MyChart as more of an overall health management tool. In future iterations of MyChart, AI will recommend that patients take certain actions, such as scheduling an annual flu shot, or give them a checklist to prepare for surgery. MyChart will also connect to wearable medical devices, such as heart monitors or constant glucose monitors for patients with arrhythmia or diabetes.
And still in early testing phases is a bot, embedded into MyChart, that could take the place of some in-person or virtual doctor's visits. In a demonstration of the technology — which doesn't have a release date but could be ready in a few years — Epic employees hushed the auditorium as they talked to the bot about how they were feeling while recovering from a hypothetical wrist surgery. Employees answered questions about their pain levels, turned on the camera to show the bot how far back they could bend their wrist and sought advice on whether they could play pickleball.
And while the AI bot didn't approve a trip out to the pickleball court just yet, it was able to determine that the range of motion was a sign of good progress and said it would prompt the employee's care team to decide whether an upcoming check-in was necessary because progress is being made. Epic's focus on integrating AI isn't new — for years, thousands of machine-based learning functions existed within its software. But the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 ignited Epic's desire to rapidly integrate more AI into its products and was a major focus of last year's conference.
Just four years ago, Epic launched Cosmos, its data and research software with 270 million de-identified patient records; last year, doctors drafted the first AI-generated messages to patients. About 12,000 people came to the UGM address Tuesday at Epic Systems in Verona. Multiple hospital systems across the country and the world are already using Epic's AI software to listen in on patient visits, with their consent, to draft after-visit summaries, queue up medication orders for doctor approval and monitor patients who are a fall risk using cameras in hospital rooms.
For clinicians and hospital support staff, AI integration can streamline tedious tasks, spot staffing shortages and help doctors reach correct diagnoses and medication decisions through Epic's research platform. A new major initiative announced Tuesday will provide clinicians with AI-driven, evidence-based information to improve diagnosing, advise treatment plans and predict whether a patient's health will improve or worsen based on a treatment plan and their adherence to it. Through Epic's Cosmos platform, doctors will be able to identify patients with similar attributes.
Through the database, doctors can research what medications might work well for their patients or narrow down what kind of diagnostic testing to try first. Epic also plans to expand its data sharing platform, named Health Grid, which looks to bring together a patient's care team across different hospitals, clinics and other doctor's offices such as dental care. Using this program, Epic software was able to alert health providers of potential negative drug interactions 78 million times since last August, "saving a number of lives" as a result, Faulkner said.
Now, by adding insurance companies and other health care payers to the Health Grid, Epic hopes to reduce the number of prior authorization denials and get patients care faster, Faulkner said. "It's been an amazing, busy year, creating new connections across the health grid, helping to figure out how health systems can thrive, improving care of patients, doing research and working with generative AI as a great new tool," Faulkner said. "We're pleased to say that just about everything we said last year that we would do got done.
" Sign up here to get the latest health & fitness updates in your inbox every week!.
