Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has created a new leadership role: associate chief health informatics officer for EHR platform and innovation.
Stephon Proctor, PhD, assumed the position on July 1. In the role, Dr. Proctor will focus on strategic leadership, EHR platform updates, and innovation, particularly generative AI.
“Because of the rapid pace of technological change, we needed a role that could help us keep up with the state of the art — both in the field and within the Epic EHR — and ensure our efforts align with our strategic goals and commitment to exceptional pediatric care,” Dr. Proctor told Becker’s.
CHOP is among the leading organizations implementing Epic’s generative AI tools.
“We were among the first to activate Epic’s In-Basket Augmented Response Technology and to roll out what Epic calls Outpatient Insights,” Dr. Proctor said. “Currently, we have about 1,000 active users summarizing notes across hundreds of thousands of encounters. We’re also working to enable other capabilities on Epic’s roadmap, including inpatient admission summarization.”
The health system is also piloting ambient AI for clinical documentation to help reduce documentation burden and support nurses in their workflow.
“In total, we have about seven pilots underway, and we’re always evaluating Epic’s newest offerings to see how effective they can be for us at CHOP,” Dr. Proctor said. “So far, we’ve seen a lot of success.”
Beyond keeping CHOP’s Epic EHR up to date, Dr. Proctor’s new role emphasizes innovation. His portfolio includes exploring technologies such as generative AI and other emerging tools, evaluating them, integrating them into clinician and patient workflows, and addressing common pain points across the field.
“As an informaticist, I see us as bridge builders — connecting clinical practice, technology, and strategy to ensure the organization meets its goals,” he said. “This includes building the workforce of the future, which is one of our pillars, and shaping our next-generation operating model.”
When it comes to staying ahead of emerging technologies, Dr. Proctor said he’s watching “the elephant in the room”: AI and where it’s taking healthcare.
“Ambient scribe tools, or ambient documentation, have been very popular, and many organizations are going live with them, seeing success in reducing documentation burden and clinician burnout,” he said. “What I’m really curious about is the next level. That’s why I created CHIPPER.”
CHIPPER is a virtual assistant embedded within the health system’s Epic EHR platform. The technology is designed to streamline time-consuming, cognitively demanding tasks for providers and is currently in technical development. It aims to become a clinical co-pilot capable of synthesizing data from internal systems and external evidence-based sources.
“I want a system that can access clinical data but also has a generative component, so it can do more than just return data I already have,” Dr. Proctor said. “I hope to move past AI simply delivering information efficiently and toward AI that can actually take action. You’ve probably heard the term ‘agentic AI.’ I’m interested in a point where, as a clinician, I can assign tasks to one or more AI agents, and they can handle them for me — for example, prepping for an upcoming visit, summarizing charts, ordering labs, or drafting messages.”
Dr. Proctor noted that clinicians perform countless repetitive tasks daily and wonders how much of that could be automated while still keeping a human in the loop.
“This next level of AI — agentic AI — could transform how we work by handling these tasks more proactively,” he said.
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