Epic’s Deep Space auditorium during UGM 2024.
By: Epic Systems
This week, Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner took to the stage dressed as a swan, complete with feathers, to deliver a keynote address to thousands of healthcare executives gathered in an underground auditorium.
The more casual standards of the tech industry ( NVIDIA Falconer’s attire — CEO Jensen Huang’s trademark leather jacket, for example — may have puzzled first-time attendees. But to many healthcare industry veterans and Epic employees, it was just business as usual. It was a sign that Epic’s annual user group meeting had officially begun. And one theme stood out at the healthcare company’s event on Tuesday: 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 in the U.S. The company stores the medical records of more than 280 million people in the U.S., with patient data often stored across multiple vendors.
Wizards and animals
Each year, thousands of people flock to Epic’s headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin, to hear about the company’s latest products and initiatives. UGM is one of the company’s largest on-campus events, and CNBC was on hand for Tuesday’s celebration.
Epic’s 1,670-acre campus is dotted with farm animals, wizard statues and buildings themed around stories like “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Fittingly, this year’s conference had a “storytime” theme, so Faulkner and other Epic executives spoke dressed as characters inspired by various children’s books.
There was no shortage of skits and jingles as Epic shared updates on its key products, which include products such as “MyChart,” an app patients can use to access their medical records, and “Cosmos,” an anonymized patient dataset that clinicians can use to conduct research.
Epic’s SVP of R&D, Seth Hain, speaking at UGM 2024.
By: Epic Systems
Epic’s Artificial Intelligence Announcement
Much of Epic’s announcement focused on how the company is integrating artificial intelligence into these products, and Faulkner said the company has more than 100 AI capabilities in development, though many of the tools are still in the early stages of development.
For example, Epic said that by the end of the year, its generative AI will help doctors revise their message replies, letters and instructions into plain language that patients can understand. Doctors will also be able to use the AI to automatically queue prescriptions and test orders, the company said.
Because many doctors must complete time-consuming tasks like filing denial appeals or reviewing prior authorization requirements, Epic said this year it is working on introducing AI tools to streamline those processes.
The company says that by the end of 2025, Epic’s generative AI will be able to populate results, medications and other details doctors need when replying to patient messages through MyChart. Other specific features, such as using AI to calculate wound dimensions from images, are also expected to arrive next year.
Epic announced plans to soon release a new staff-scheduling application for doctors and nurses called “Teamwork.” Additionally, Faulkner said Epic is “investigating” ways to facilitate claims submission directly through the software, without the need for an intermediary such as a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could herald a major shift in how claims are processed across the healthcare industry.
It remains to be seen whether all of these features will come to fruition, and whether health systems will actually use them. Still, Epic ended its presentation on Tuesday with a spectacular demo that showed just how far it thinks its technology can go.
future
Seth Hayne, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, hosted the demo. Hayne spoke to the AI agent through the MyChart app about his recovery after wrist surgery and answered questions about pain. The agent asked Hayne to open the camera and flex his wrist so it could assess his healing progress. The agent said Hayne’s wrist extension was about 60-75 degrees, which compared with data from similar patients in Epic’s Cosmos database, meaning his recovery was ahead of schedule.
Hayne asked his agent if he could play pickleball again, but his agent told him he would have to “wait a little longer” before doing so.
At a press conference after the presentation, Hayne said the demos were happening in real time without any human interaction, but the feature is so new that Epic hasn’t even given it a name yet, and it will probably be years before it’s more widely available, Hayne said.
““It’s still very, very early days as to where and how the local community, the broader health care community, will adopt this kind of thing, but it is doable,” he said.
