If there is one thing Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner likes to emphasize, it’s whatever is new or next, especially when it comes to the company’s electronic medical records technology.
In the case of her annual executive address Tuesday morning, she kicked off the company’s Users Group Meeting with a rundown of the over 160 artificial intelligence projects Epic is working on.
Epic’s market-leading electronic health records (EHR) software is deployed across the world in hospitals, health systems and homes. More than 325 million patients have electronic records in Epic, according to the company, which counts $4.9 billion in annual revenue.
Epic UGM, the sci-fi-themed, four-day conference underway at the company’s Verona campus, is designed for executives, directors and clinicians.
Faulkner, who took the stage in a futuristic outfit in keeping with UGM’s theme, had a direct message to them: “This is a huge time of growth for technology and medicine with things that couldn’t be done before. It’s exciting to us at Epic, and I hope it’s exciting to you, too, as you see it all come together.”
She said so much of sci-fiction comes true, citing various examples of one-time sci-fi dreams that now are reality: Human flight, watches you can talk to, and listening devices in your home to ask questions of and get large amounts of information quickly gathered and analyzed.
“On the medical side, you’ve got X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, DNA sequencing, blood transfusions, organ transplants and meds for medical problems that used to be fatal,” Faulkner said.
Epic’s constant innovation is a prime reason it has reached the preeminent position in the electronic medical records space. Its products are among the topics explored at the gathering, and Faulkner went through each one — pointing out AI has either already improved them or will improve them further. They include:
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The MyChart patient portal, which connects patients to their health care records and now serves 190 million patients worldwide.
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Integrated EHR — inpatient, outpatient and much more in one database. “We often call that the comprehensive medical record,” Faulkner said, after noting Epic eschews venture capital and equity financing, and does not acquire other companies and technologies. “Electronic seems like a wasted word now, and you can’t do that integrated, comprehensive health record with acquisitions and interfaces.”
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Care Everywhere, Epic’s interoperability platform, which enables electronic medical records in different health systems to talk to one another. Faulkner said Epic was the first to provide interoperability, and it was because a young patient died when she was traveling: Health care personnel didn’t have her record and they didn’t know how to treat her.
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Finally, Cosmos, which provides EHR data for research and provides evidence-based, best-medicine practices at the point of care. “Cosmos now has 300 million anonymized and deduplicated unique patients, 116 billion encounters, and it’s in four different countries now — the U.S., Canada, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and soon to be Switzerland,” Faulkner said. “Some of you are working hard to make joining Cosmos possible in your countries, and there are many advantages.”
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AI Focus
Faulkner said Epic started working on basic, generative AI quietly “with some of the companies that were inventing it well before the world knew much about it,” and now it has somewhere between 160-200 AI projects underway.
“Some of them are completed or in process, and some of them will be permeating every area of our software,” she said.
With AI, she said the company is focused on three objectives.
First, Epic aims to help clinicians do their job with an AI tool called Art, which among other things will create a note for the visit and a patient summary for the clinician. Art can also query Cosmos, which has insights relevant to the patient and can improve the accuracy of a diagnosis.
“For example, ART can look through Cosmos and be a diagnostic adviser for the patient you’re seeing,” Faulkner said. “ART could say, ‘24,572 patients like this, 97% of them have diagnosis A and only 5.5% have diagnosis B, which is the one you prescribed. So do you think you should rethink it?’”
The second objective, she said, is to help the health care organizations stay financially strong with an AI tool called Penny, which helps manage revenue cycles and other administrative areas.
Third, Epic is developing an AI tool called Emmie, which will help patients schedule the appointment, and then reach out to the patient to find out what they want to discuss during the visit. Emmie also will create a visit agenda. After the visit, Faulkner said Emmie will help patients understand their test results and answer some of their questions.
“Now, I think it’s interesting that usually No. 3 is No. 1, but now I think that with all the challenges health care organizations are facing,” Faulkner said, “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.”
One of the things AI will help with is charting. Microsoft, which already supplies various services for Epic throughout its software, also supplies Epic with additional Dragon Copilot ambient technology such as transcription and “diarization.”
Faulkner said that’s a new word to her that means “who said what,” and it currently supplies the note itself. Epic’s native AI charting is under development and over time, she said Epic will work to create the best final note using a combination of Microsoft Note components and Epic Note components.
“You’ll be able to license the AI charting capability from Epic and it will include all the parts I just mentioned, Microsoft’s and Epic’s,” Faulkner told attendees.
Following Faulkner’s address, Microsoft executive Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health & Life Sciences Solutions and Platforms, released a statement noting that Microsoft Dragon Copilot, a clinical AI assistant, was introduced in March.
“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,” Petro said in the statement. “We look forward to sharing more details soon.”
Beyond charting, Faulkner said Epic AI is combining the intelligence and curiosity of human beings with the investigative capabilities of generative AI.
Among the company’s ongoing AI projects are efforts to add an organ donation opt-in to MyChart, disease outbreak monitoring and detection using Cosmos, a new Clinical Trials Management System and a new enterprise resource planning system that works hands in glove with EHRs. The latter two, Faulkner said, are being developed by customer request.
“Instead of calling it artificial intelligence, we’re calling it health care intelligence as we put all of those together, and we think these are going to make significant changes,” she said. “All of these are important to get the full picture of health care intelligence.”
Related story: At Epic, it’s all about the customer
