Visitors will be participating in UGM 2025.
Courtesy of Epic
Space travelers, robots, and of course artificial intelligence.
They were all on display on Tuesday at the Epic Systems annual user group meeting on the Health Software giant’s 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin.
Judy Faulkner, 82-year-old CEO of Epic, dressed in a purple wig with neon green shoes and an iridescent vest, reminiscent of the light-lightyear of the fictional character from the “Toy Story” franchise.
At the science fiction-themed event, Faulkner told the crowd that Epic has around 200 different AI capabilities in its development aimed at supporting patients, clinicians and insurance companies.
“We combine human intelligence and curiosity with Gen AI’s research capabilities,” Faulkner said in front of thousands of medical executives crammed into an 11,400-seat underground auditorium.
One of the nation’s largest private technology companies, Epic is best known for its electronic health records, or EHR software. The EHR is a digital version of patient medical history updated by doctors and nurses, and this technology is essential to the modern American healthcare system.
Competing Epic software Oracle Health (formerly Cerner) is used by 280 million Americans, according to the company. Many patients know Epic for a user portal called MyChart.
Last week, Epic unveiled MyChart Central. This allows patients to log in to MyChart with a set of credentials rather than requiring a username and password for each health system they visit. Faulkner said it’s just as useful for healthcare providers.
“We’ll spend less time processing patients’ calls and resetting passwords,” she said in her keynote speech on Tuesday. “Demographic changes like addresses must be added only once.”
New additions to the MyChart portal are always on Emmy Assistant. The company said it would answer questions about the lab results, suggest appointment times and propose relevant screenings that patients can discuss with their physicians.
During the three-hour presentation on Epic, Faulkner and other executives introduced Emmie and other AI assistants to what other AI assistants call Art and Penny, highlighting new features coming next year and beyond.
Medical executives will be participating in UGM 2025.
Courtesy of Epic
The Art Assistant is aimed at clinicians and aims to act as active AI digital colleagues, the company said. Art can predict information that a doctor may need, for example, and extract information such as blood pressure trends, update a patient’s family history, and place an order.
The company also said ART could draft a clinical note, one of the most anticipated announcements ahead of the meeting. AI-powered clinical documentation tools are often referred to as AI scribes, but with patient consent, they can take real-time notes about patient visits as doctors record their encounters.
AI Scribes has exploded in popularity as healthcare executives search for solutions to reduce staff burnout and make administrative workloads difficult. Some startups in the space, such as Abridge and Ambience Healthcare, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.
Epic said its AI charting tool is built in collaboration Microsoft. Epic and Microsoft have been working closely for nearly 20 years, and Microsoft’s Dax Copilot products are already popular in the AI Scribing Market.
“We are pleased to announce that we are committed to providing a range of services to our customers,” said Joe Petro, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Health & Life Sciences.
Epic’s Penny Assistant is designed to help you with your revenue cycle management and other management needs. For example, generate an appeal for a claim that is denied. Proposals also help speed up medical coding, Faulkner said. These two features are already live.
“With all the challenges facing healthcare organizations, we need to make sure our clinicians and our organization are doing strong and well to care for our patients,” Faulkner said.
Epic has closed its executive address by bullying new AI features that appear in COSMOS. Health Systems must opt-in to join COSMOS, and the database currently contains information from over 1,760 hospitals and 300 million patients.
Based on this data, Epic said it is building its own set of basic models called Cosmos AI. The company still evaluates a variety of applications in its model and launches the COSMOS AI Lab to help researchers and data scientists learn more.
Executives said the model could be used to predict a patient’s potential medical event timeline, including a risk of readmission or the possibility of a heart attack.
“We are committed to providing a range of services that will help us to create a range of services,” said Seth Hain, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Epic. “I’ve only used it with 8 billion people so far, so I’m just starting out.”
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