
Judy Faulkner unveils ‘healthcare intelligence’
With AI wrapped around all features of Epic, Judy Faulkner introduced “healthcare intelligence” for her company’s EHR.
“We are combining the intelligence and curiosity of the human being with the investigative capabilities of gen AI,” Ms. Faulkner said Aug. 19 at Epic’s annual Users Group Meeting in Verona, Wis. “And instead of calling it artificial intelligence, we’re calling it healthcare intelligence.”
In front of a packed, 11,400-seat auditorium, the Epic CEO and co-founder revealed to her health system customers the new AI features being incorporated into the EHR.
“For the data, there is the EHR, the patient’s medical record, and, integrated with the patient’s MyChart, the patient’s voice and thoughts,” she said. “Then there is the Health Grid [which connects Epic to nonprovider organizations] plus the learnings from the huge amount of high-quality patient data in Cosmos,” Epic’s research platform.
Cosmos, which nearly two-thirds of Epic’s customers have already joined, contains deidentified data from 300 million unique patients, 16 billion encounters and 1.7 trillion medical events. Health Grid includes payers, standalone specialists, care at home, and medical device manufacturers.
Merging all of these sources, Epic will be able to “predict the future” for patients, Ms. Faulkner said.
Ms. Faulkner also unveiled Epic’s new ambient documentation tool. Clinicians will use Epic’s smartphone and tablet apps — Haiku and Canto — to record patient visits, which Microsoft’s Dragon ambient AI technology will transcribe and “diarize,” as she put it.
“We’ll work to create the best final note using a combination of Microsoft note components and Epic note components,” she said. “You’ll be able to license the AI charting capability from Epic. … Customers can use other third parties to do ambient AI, as they do today.”
The tool will be available in early 2026.
Epic also presented its new AI assistants: Art for clinicians, Emmie for patients and Penny for revenue cycle management. The AI will create what Ms. Faulkner deemed an “intelligent visit,” with note generation, real-time prior authorizations and diagnostic advice. The various AI agents have different release dates.
“Art can look through Cosmos and be a diagnostic advisor for the patient you’re seeing. For example, Art could say: [Of] 24,572 patients like this, 97% of them have diagnosis A and only 5.5% have diagnosis B, which is the one you’ve prescribed. So do you think you should rethink it?” she said. “So Art and Cosmos would be able to predict many things: the probability of disease, the onset of symptoms, diagnosis and treatments, and after the visit, Emmie will help patients understand their test results and answer some of their questions.”
With a “large medical model” trained on Cosmos data, Epic plans to use AI to predict patients’ journeys over their lifetimes — say, the likelihood of when they might have a heart attack — so providers can intervene early. Patients would have as many as 25 potential “timelines” each.
The company has 160 to 200 AI projects in the works, Ms. Faulkner said.
Epic’s Executive Package also allows health systems to compare how they stack up against their peers on AI adoption, she said. Epic’s Launch Pad helps organizations roll out the AI features. The pricing options include a pay-as-you-go option and a new all-inclusive approach with predictable pricing.
The theme for this year’s Users Group Meeting was science fiction.
“A lot of sci-fi predicts a future that comes true. Why do we predict the future? We predict the future so we can prepare for it, and so we can change it,” Ms. Faulkner said. “Epic AI — learning from the electronic health record, MyChart, the Health Grid and the stories of billions of patient encounters is Cosmos, and helping you with each of your patients individually — is sci-fi turning into reality.”
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