Epic touts new AI tools for patients and doctors at company's annual meeting

CNBC

3 hours ago

Space travelers, robots and, of course, artificial intelligence.
They were all on display on Tuesday at Epic Systems' annual Users Group Meeting, held at 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, reminiscent of the fictional character Buzz Lightyear from the "Toy Story" franchise.
At the science fiction-themed event, Faulkner told the crowd that Epic has roughly 200 different AI features in development that aim to assist patients, clinicians and insurers.
"We are combining the intelligence and curiosity of the human being with the investigative capabilities of gen AI," Faulkner said, in front of thousands of health-care executives packed into an 11,400-seat underground auditorium.
Epic, one of the largest private technology companies in 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's updated by doctors and nurses, and the technology is integral to the modern U.S. health-care system.
Epic's software, which competes with Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), is used by 280 million Americans, according to the company. Many patients know of Epic because of its user portal called MyChart.
Last week, Epic announced MyChart Central, which will allow patients to log in to MyChart with just one set of credentials, rather than needing a username and password for each health system they visit. It's equally helpful for health-care organizations, Faulkner said.
"You'll spend less time handling patient calls and resetting passwords," she said in her keynote on Tuesday. "Demographic changes like address need to be added only once."
A new addition to the MyChart portal is the always-on Emmie assistant, which the company said will be able to answer questions about lab results, propose appointment times and suggest relevant screenings that patients can discuss with their doctor.
During Epic's three-hour presentation, Faulkner and other executives introduced Emmie as well as other AI assistants the company calls Art and Penny, highlighting new capabilities that are coming in the next year and beyond.
The Art assistant is intended for clinicians, and is meant to act as an active AI digital colleague, the company said. Art will be able to anticipate information that a doctor might need, for instance, and can pull up information like blood pressure trends, update a patient's family history and place orders.
The company also said Art will be able to draft clinical notes, which was one of the most highly anticipated announcements ahead of the conference. AI-powered clinical documentation tools, which are often 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 search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads. Some startups in the space, including Abridge and Ambience Healthcare, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.
Epic said its AI charting tool is being built in collaboration with Microsoft. Epic and Microsoft have been working closely together for roughly two decades, and Microsoft's DAX Copilot product is already a popular offering within the AI scribing market.
"We're proud to be collaborating with Epic to explore how we can bring our core Dragon ambient AI technology to Epic's new AI Charting capability to further improve care delivery," Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health & Life Sciences said in a statement.
Epic's Penny assistant is designed to help with revenue cycle management and other administrative needs, such as generating appeal letters for insurance claims that get denied. It can also help speed up medical coding by serving up suggestions, Faulkner said. Those two features are already live.
"With all the challenges health-care organizations are facing, we need to make sure our clinicians and our organizations are strong and doing well in order to be able to take care of patients," Faulkner said.
Epic closed out its executive address by teasing new AI capabilities that are coming to Cosmos, which is a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct research. Health systems have to opt-in to participate in Cosmos, and the database currently includes information from more than 1,760 hospitals and 300 million patients.
Epic said it's building a set of proprietary foundation models, called Cosmos AI, based on this data. The company is still evaluating different applications of the models, and launched the Cosmos AI Lab to help researchers and data scientists learn more.
Executives said the models could be used to predict a timeline of a patient's potential medical events, like whether they're a readmission risk or could eventually experience a heart attack.
"We're finding that it continues to improve as it sees more patients," said Seth Hain, a senior vice president of research and development at Epic. "Having only used 8 billion encounters so far, we're just getting started."