Health systems never switched on the connection between patients’ medical records and ChatGPT. They’re absorbing some of the cost anyway, and Epic is building a way to cut down on the traffic.
Seth Howard, executive vice president of research and development at Epic, addressed the issue with software developers during the opening session of the company’s Open@Epic conference Oct. 21 at the company’s Wisconsin headquarters.
“So I know there are cases where you might want to continually pull for new information, and that takes some resources on the health system IT infrastructure with the adoption of IAS [individual access services], with the adoption of consumer chatbots, connecting with patients’ health records,” Mr. Howard said. “This is only increasing. Our customers are definitely noticing the extra traffic.”
The traffic comes with a price tag. The number of patients linking their MyChart accounts to ChatGPT at Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health rose more than 7,000% from July to August, and the health system is absorbing part of the cost of the resulting API calls against its Epic EHR, its CIO told Becker’s earlier this month.
“There is some cost to us based on the volume of patients and the number of requests each patient enters into Chat. There is compute power required for this, so that will be a cost to someone,” Bobbie Byrne, MD, executive vice president and CIO of Advocate, said at the time. “Right now we can absorb the amounts, but I would be concerned if the growth rate escalates.”
Those connections run through ChatGPT Health, which OpenAI opened to all eligible U.S. users in July. Dr. Byrne said Advocate did nothing to enable them, and that she understood Epic was working with OpenAI to make the API calls as efficient as possible.
Under Epic’s model, the health systems running the software, not the vendor, carry that infrastructure.
“Epic ships code to our customers, but they own the system and they own the data,” Mr. Howard said. “So customers are in control.”
Mr. Howard pointed developers to a change in how those apps learn about new information. It relies on FHIR, a data standard health apps commonly use to exchange records.
“So we’re supporting FHIR notifications. … But the goal is to help you efficiently build apps that don’t need to just constantly ask, ‘Is there anything new? Is there anything new?'” Mr. Howard said.
“Health systems can decide which notifications they want to support in sending out, so that you know when something new happens,” he said. “So, for example, a patient had a visit, notification goes out, and the app can respond to that notification instead of polling every 30 minutes to see ‘is there a visit?’ So we think this will help you, and it will help health systems scale these types of connections.”
Other updates Mr. Howard outlined could add to the volume by making it easier for patients to send their records to outside apps.
“So last year we announced plans to make it easier for patients to share records from multiple connected Epic health systems with a single action in MyChart Central, and that is now available,” he said. “So we think this will make it easier for those patients to share their data with your applications.”
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