Epic's Deep Space Auditorium during UGM 2024.
Courtesy: Epic Systems
This week, in an underground auditorium packed with thousands of healthcare executives, Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic Systems, took the stage to deliver a keynote address dressed as a swan, feathers and all.
Even by the most casual standards of the tech industry (take Nvidia For example, CEO Jensen Huang’s signature leather jacket may have thrown off some first-time attendees, but for many healthcare industry veterans and Epic employees, it was business as usual — a sign that Epic’s annual user group meeting was officially underway. And one theme stood out during the healthcare company’s event on Tuesday: how new AI features can help doctors and patients.
Epic is a healthcare software giant whose technology is used in thousands of hospitals and clinics across the United States. The company stores the medical records of more than 280 million people in the United States, although patients often have data stored across multiple providers.
Wizards and animals
Every year, thousands of people flock to Epic's headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin, to learn about its latest products and initiatives. UGM is one of the company's biggest annual events on campus, and CNBC attended the festivities on Tuesday.
Epic's 1,670-acre campus is filled with farm animals, wizard statues and buildings with themes like “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Fittingly, this year's conference is themed around “story time,” and Faulkner and other Epic executives spoke dressed as characters inspired by various children's books.
There was no shortage of parodies and jingles as they shared updates on Epic’s core products, including its offerings like MyChart, an app that patients can use to access their medical records, and Cosmos, a set of anonymized patient data that doctors can use to conduct research.
Seth Hain, Senior Vice President of R&D at Epic, speaking at UGM 2024.
Courtesy: Epic Systems
Epic's AI announcements
Many of Epic’s announcements focused on how the company is integrating artificial intelligence into these products. Faulkner said the company has more than 100 AI features in the works, though many of the tools are still in the early stages of development.
For example, by the end of this year, Epic said its generative AI will help doctors review responses to messages, letters and instructions in plain language that patients can understand. Doctors will be able to use AI to automatically queue orders for prescriptions and lab tests, the company said.
Many physicians have to perform time-consuming tasks such as writing insurance denial appeal letters and reviewing prior authorization requirements, so Epic said it is working to introduce artificial intelligence tools that can streamline those processes this year.
By the end of 2025, Epic’s generative AI will be able to pull up the results, medications and other details a doctor might need when responding to a patient’s message through MyChart, the company said. Other specific features, such as using AI to calculate wound measurements from images, will also arrive next year.
Epic announced plans for a new staff scheduling app for doctors and nurses called “Teamwork” that will be available soon. In addition, Faulkner said Epic is “investigating” how it could facilitate claims submission directly through its software, without the need for a middleman like a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could mark a major shift in how insurance claims are processed across the healthcare industry.
Whether all of these features will materialize and whether healthcare systems will actually use them remains to be seen. Still, Epic closed its presentation Tuesday by showing a demonstration of what the company thinks it can do with its technology.
The future
Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, facilitated the demo. He spoke to an AI agent through the MyChart app about his recovery after a supposed wrist surgery and answered questions about his pain. The agent instructed Hain to open his camera and bend his wrist back so he could assess the progress of his healing. The agent said Hain’s wrist extension was about 60 to 75 degrees, which meant his recovery was ahead of schedule, compared to data from similar patients in Epic’s Cosmos database.
Hain asked the agent if he could start playing pickleball again, and was told he “should wait a little longer” before doing so.
In a meeting with reporters after the presentation, Hain said the demonstration was happening in real time without any human intervention. However, that capability is so new that Epic doesn’t even have a name for it yet, and Hain said it will likely be a few years before it’s more widely available.
““It's very, very, very early days in terms of how and where the community, the broader medical community, will adopt that kind of thing, but it's feasible,” he said.
