Epic has been the talk of healthcare executives since the EHR company launched several new AI products at its annual conference for customers Aug. 18-21.

So what stands out to health system leaders?

Epic plans to incorporate AI into all aspects of its EHR — from the clinician-facing chart to patients’ MyChart portal — in a concept company founder and CEO Judy Faulkner dubbed “healthcare intelligence.”

“From where I sit, the big takeaway is Epic’s move toward ‘healthcare intelligence,’” Muhammad Siddiqui, CIO of Richmond, Ind.-based Reid Health, told Becker’s for an Aug. 21 story. “It feels like a real shift — from just documenting care to using the platform as a smart, real-time tool that brings together data, AI and workflows.”

That includes three AI assistants: Art for clinicians, Emmie for patients and Penny for revenue cycle management. Each of the three will include a bevy of AI agents, according to the company’s plans, who will be able to complete tasks like answering clinicians’ questions in the EHR to authorizing claims in real time.

To much fanfare, Epic also revealed plans for its new ambient AI scribe for clinical documentation, which will compete with startups in the field such as Abridge and Ambience Healthcare.

“Epic is doing the listening, using Haiku and Canto. Microsoft supplies Epic with Dragon ambient AI technology — transcription and diarization, as well as important note components. Epic then takes all of that to create the final note and visit documentation,” the company explained in a statement at the event. “Customers can use other third parties to do ambient AI as they do today.”

With few details other than the product being set for release early next year, health system leaders are still wondering about the cost and what happens to customers who use Microsoft’s Nuance for ambient AI documentation in Epic now.

“There was a lot of noise over the last week or so about Epic developing their own ambient clinical documentation tool, and the fact that this appears to be more of a white labeling of an existing tool, I’m still thinking through the ramifications of that,” Michael Han, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer of Tacoma, Wash.-based MultiCare Health System, told Becker’s at the Users Group Meeting.

To make AI more affordable, Epic has introduced an “AI suite” to go along with its pay-as-you-go model, the company said. Epic also brings health systems together to quickly roll out AI features with its Launchpad program; Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine was one of the recent participants.

“Yesterday’s breakthroughs are today’s table stakes, and somehow we’re still just getting started,” Epic President Sumit Rana said at the conference. “AI is here, it’s accelerating, you can’t wish it away. You’re going to have to keep up with it.”

Epic unveiled other new tools, such as enterprise resource planning for workforce, supply chain and financials, and a so-called “large medical model” for clinical decision support. Many executives are excited for the latter’s potential to help providers make more accurate diagnoses, using Epic’s Cosmos database of billions of anonymized patient encounters as a repository. Adjectives that flowed from health system leaders’ lips for that capability included “transformational” and “incredible.”

Epic displayed how it could one day predict a patient’s life span based on their previous medical records, with 25 potential possibilities that throw in variables like accidents. This could allow clinicians to work now to prevent health events years into the future, such as a predicted emergency department visit or high blood sugar.

“Suppose in our patient’s story, they were recently admitted, the model will predict what happens during the stay. Eventually, that includes a discharge, and we can use that to easily calculate their likely length of stay,” said Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, at the Users Group Meeting. “Now, if we continue to generate more and more events, we end up years in the future, predicting, for example, their likelihood of a heart attack over the next three years.”

He noted that Epic’s AI is multimodal, meaning “it can see, hear, sense and respond, kind of like having an extra clinical helper at the bedside 24/7.”

Epic will eventually power an “intelligent visit,” Ms. Faulkner said, with automatically generated visit agendas and notes, live prior authorizations and diagnostic advice.

For patients, instead of having to log into multiple MyChart accounts, they will now have a single sign-in across the patient portals. Broad rollout for MyChart Central is scheduled for November, with early adopters including St. Louis-based SSM Health, West Des Moines, Iowa-based UnityPoint Health and Madison, Wis.-based UW Health. Patients can also now sign up to be organ donors in MyChart and get preventive care reminders beginning in February.

Will Epic be able to come through on all this? Of 77 major projects mentioned at the 2024 Users Group Meeting, the company has completed 43 of them while 30 are on track and four are being re-evaluated, Ms. Faulkner noted. At his 17th UGM, Dan Exley, interim chief information and innovation officer of San Diego-based Sharp HealthCare, told Becker’s he has “rarely seen Epic miss a date, and I can’t remember a time when they broke a promise.”

“So much of sci-fi eventually comes true,” Ms. Faulkner said during her executive address, echoing the theme of the conference. “Epic AI … is sci-fi turning into reality.”

The post Epic’s AI shift: What health system leaders need to know appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.