Epic's Deep Space auditorium during UGM 2024.
Courtesy: Epic Systems
In an underground auditorium packed with thousands of health-care executives this week, Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner stepped on stage to deliver a keynote dressed like a swan, feathers and all.
Even by the tech industry's more casual standards (take Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's trademark leather jacket, for instance), Faulkner's costume may have puzzled some first-time attendees. But for many health-care industry veterans and Epic employees, it was business as usual— a sign that Epic's annual Users Group Meeting was officially underway. And one theme stood out during the health-care company's event on Tuesday: How new artificial intelligence features can help doctors and patients.
Epic is a health-care software giant whose technology is used in thousands of U.S. hospitals and clinics. The company houses medical records for more than 280 million individuals in the U.S., though patients often have data stored across multiple vendors.
Wizards and animals
Each year, thousands of people descend on Epic's headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin to hear about its latest products and initiatives. UGM is one of the company's largest annual on-campus events, and CNBC attended the festivities on Tuesday.
Epic's 1,670-acre campus is sprinkled with farm animals, statues of wizards and buildings themed like "Alice in Wonderland" and "The Wizard of Oz." Fittingly, this year's conference is "storytime" themed, and Faulkner and other Epic executives spoke while dressed as characters inspired by various children's books.
There was no shortage of skits and jingles as they shared updates across Epic's major products, including its offerings like MyChart, an app patients can use to access their medical records, and Cosmos, a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct research.
Seth Hain, senior vice president of R&D at Epic, speaking at UGM 2024.
Courtesy: Epic Systems
Epic's Artificial Intelligence announcements
Many of Epic's announcements centered around 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 instance, by the end of this year, Epic said its generative AI will help doctors revise message responses, letters and instructions into plain language that patients can understand. Doctors will be able to use AI to automatically queue up orders for prescriptions and labs, the company said.
Many physicians have to carry out time-consuming tasks like drafting insurance denial appeal letters and reviewing prior authorization requirements, so Epic said it is working to introduce AI tools that can streamline those processes this year.
By the end of 2025, Epic's generative AI will be able to pull in the results, medications and other details that a doctor might need when responding to a patient's message through MyChart, the company said. Other specific functions, like using AI to calculate wound measurements from images, are also coming next year.
Epic announced plans for a new staff scheduling application for physicians and nurses called "Teamwork" that's coming soon. Additionally, Faulkner said Epic is "investigating" how it could facilitate claims submissions directly through its software, without the need for a middleman like a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could mark a major change in the way that insurance claims are processed throughout the health-care industry.
Whether these features will all come to fruition — and whether health systems will actually use them — isn't yet known. Even so, Epic closed its presentation Tuesday by showcasing a lofty demo about where the company believes its technology can go.
The future
Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development at Epic, 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 it could evaluate 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 it told him that he "should still wait a little longer" before doing so.
In a meeting with reporters after the presentation, Hain said the demo was happening in real-time without 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 is very, very, very early in regards to how and where the community, the broader medical community, will adopt that type of thing, but it's viable," he said.
