In an underground auditorium full of hundreds of healthcare executives this week, Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic Systems, took the stage to deliver a keynote speech wearing a swan costume complete with feathers.
Even by the more relaxed standards of the tech industry (take NVIDIA Faulkner's costume (the leather jacket that’s CEO Jensen Huang's trademark, for instance) could have confused some first-time attendees. But for a lot of healthcare industry veterans and Epic employees, it was business as usual – an indication that Epic's annual Users Group Meeting had officially begun. And one theme stood out through the healthcare company's event on Tuesday: how latest artificial intelligence features will help doctors and patients.
Epic is a healthcare software giant whose technology is utilized in hundreds of U.S. hospitals and clinics. The company manages the medical records of greater than 280 million people within the U.S., although patients' data is usually stored with multiple providers.
Wizards and animals
Every 12 months, hundreds of individuals flock to Epic's headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin, to learn in regards to the company's latest products and initiatives. UGM is one among the corporate's largest annual events on campus, and CNBC was available for the festivities on Tuesday.
Epic's 1,600-acre campus is stuffed with livestock, wizard statues and buildings themed around “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Fittingly, this 12 months's conference is themed “story time,” and Faulkner and other Epic executives spoke as characters from various children's books.
There was no shortage of skits and jingles as they shared updates on Epic's key products, including offerings like MyChart, an app that permits patients to access their medical records, and Cosmos, an anonymized patient dataset that doctors can use for research.
Epic’s Artificial Intelligence Announcements
Many of Epic's announcements revolved around how the corporate is integrating artificial intelligence into these products. Faulkner said the corporate is working on greater than 100 AI features, although lots of the tools are still in early development.
For example, by the tip of this 12 months, Epic plans to make use of its generative AI to assist doctors translate responses to messages, letters and directions into language that patients can understand. Doctors can use AI to mechanically queue prescription and lab orders, the corporate said.
Many physicians must complete time-consuming tasks, reminiscent of drafting appeal letters against insurance denials or reviewing authorization requests, so Epic said the corporate is working to launch AI tools this 12 months that might streamline those processes.
By the tip of 2025, Epic's generative AI will have the ability to tug the outcomes, medications and other details a health care provider may have when responding to a patient's message through MyChart, the corporate said. More specific features, reminiscent of using AI to calculate wound measurements from images, can even be available next 12 months.
Epic announced plans for a brand new staff scheduling application for doctors and nurses called Teamwork, which is coming soon. In addition, Faulkner said Epic is “exploring” the way it could enable claims to be submitted directly through its software, without the necessity for a middleman like a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could mark a significant shift in how insurance claims are processed across the healthcare industry.
Whether all of those features will actually be implemented – and whether health systems will actually use them – will not be yet known. Nevertheless, Epic ended its presentation on Tuesday with a classy demo that showed where the corporate desires to go together with its technology.
The future
Seth Hain, Epic's senior vp of research and development, hosted the demo. He spoke to an AI agent via the MyChart app about his recovery from what he claimed was wrist surgery and answered questions on his pain. The agent instructed Hain to activate his camera and bend his wrist backwards so the progress of his healing may very well be assessed. The agent said Hain's wrist extension was about 60 to 75 degrees, meaning his recovery was faster than planned in comparison with data from similar patients in Epic's Cosmos database.
Hain asked the agent if he could start playing pickleball again, and the agent told him to “wait a little longer.”
In a gathering with reporters after the presentation, Hain said the demo runs in real time without human intervention. However, this feature is so latest that Epic doesn't also have a name for it yet, and Hain said it should likely be a number of years before it's widely available.
“It's still very, very, very early days as to whether and how society, the broader medical community, will adopt these kinds of things, but it's doable,” he said.
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