Epic continues to institute AI capabilities into its EHR.
Here are five things to know about AI at Epic, according to a July blog post from Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development at Epic:
1. Generative AI is no longer novel. “Today, more than 75% of our health system customers use gen AI,” Mr. Hain wrote. “At The Christ Hospital, for example, it has helped oncologists treat nearly 70% of lung cancer cases at stage I or II, well above the national average. Northeast Georgia Health System has seen a 46% improvement in accuracy and efficiency of coding. Nurses at Mercy, UNC Health, and Houston Methodist opt to use more than 90% of the end-of-shift notes drafted by Epic AI.”
2. AI agents will be an EHR colleague. EHR “inputs include voice, sight, text, genomics and advanced diagnostics, medical device information, and much more,” he wrote. “AI agents, Epic’s second arc of generative AI and one that is well underway, will interact not only with this information, but also with users, sharing insights and receiving guidance that allows them to act toward a prescribed goal. A platform like this is the next generation of healthcare technology.”
3. Epic customers have a unique AI opportunity. “Our early agents are embedded into existing workflows, providing a seamless experience for clinicians and their patients,” he wrote. “They’re capable of organization-wide actions, drawing from an integrated action library that spans clinical, financial and operational workflows.”
4. Epic can help health systems with AI governance. “One of our solutions is our open-sourced AI Trust and Assurance Suite,” he wrote. “It gives the healthcare community the ability to validate the newest AI — our models and anyone else’s — across diverse populations and real-world workflows. Most recently, the suite expanded to include a tool to assess AI-generated patient summaries.”
5. Epic is optimistic about AI. “The name Epic comes from epic poems like the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey,'” he wrote. “Part of what makes poetry special is the concept-to-word ratio. The richness of a poem’s language often shares more than its word count seems capable of capturing. Medical records — dense in information, spanning lifetimes — share this trait. And, like poems, the analysis of medical records can reveal meaning that might otherwise go unseen. Healthcare is heading into a new age of insights.”
