Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has developed an AI-powered virtual assistant designed to support clinicians with various tasks in its Epic EHR system.
The tool, named CHIPPER, was developed by Stephon Proctor, PhD, a board-certified clinical psychologist and associate professor of clinical psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. Shakeeb Akhter, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer at CHOP, announced the tool in a July LinkedIn post.
Mr. Akhter said CHIPPER uses multiple layers of CHOP’s digital infrastructure. The hospital’s enterprise technology and platform services teams partnered with Microsoft to deploy Azure, while internal data, analytics and AI teams developed “CHOP GPT,” a HIPAA-compliant large language model based on GPT-4.0. Integration with Epic enables CHIPPER to operate as a virtual agent within the EHR, with access to external tools including PubMed, the FDA and ClinicalTrials.gov.
“This is digital innovation at its finest,” Mr. Akhter wrote. “A great example of the magic that happens when technology teams make the latest technology accessible to those with deep clinical and technical expertise … who then develop innovative solutions that drive healthcare forward.”
CHIPPER is currently in development at CHOP and is not deployed in production yet.
