The theme of this year’s Epic User Group Meeting (UGM) was Castaway which was inspired by both the Tom Hank’s movie as well as earlier fare like Gilligan’s Island. A more appropriate theme may have been the Fast and Furious movies given the fast pace of announcements from senior company leaders on Day 2 of the event.
Dressed in a brightly colored “island survivor“ outfit which was perfectly on-theme, Epic CEO Judy Faulkner strode onto the UGM stage to deliver her keynote address to the amassed audience of 38,000 customers and employees (virtual + in-person). Her hour-long speech was packed with updates.
Generative AI
Sprinkled through Faulkner’s opening address were several announcements related to generative AI, the technology that has captivated the world. Epic has or will deploy generative AI capabilities in the following areas:
- In-Baskets. AI will generate drafts of responses to in-basket items for clinicians so instead of having to hand-craft responses from scratch, they can simply modify what the AI creates. Early response has been positive with some patients commenting how the generated responses are more empathetic than prior communications.
- Ambient Clinical Notes. Powered by Microsoft/Nuance’s DAX solution.
- Explaining Medical Bills. An AI-powered chatbot will be available in the future through Epic’s Hello World platform that will help explain complex medical bills to patients.
- Note Summaries. For both clinicians and researchers, AI will be used to create summaries of notes.
- Coding and Billing. AI will be used to make suggestions to coders based on what it finds in the medical record.
- Rare Disease research. AI embedded within Epic will one day be able to more quickly identify patients who have similar symptoms and other characteristics which will accelerate research of rare diseases.
These matched an announcement from Epic’s partner Microsoft which dropped earlier in the day.
Revamped Partnership Program
During her keynote, Faulkner unveiled Epic’s new partnership program, dubbed “Showroom”. Showroom replaces the company’s app market which was shut down in December of last year.
Within Showroom are four distinct partnership categories (note: not levels) for third-party vendors:
- Member Services for established integrations providing complementary value. There are no partners in this category yet, but Faulkner indicated there will be many in the weeks ahead.
- Pals for companies with new products in new key areas (read: companies with promising technologies in areas where Epic does not currently have a solution). There are currently two companies in this category. Abridge offers generative AI for clinical documentation and was the first company named to the “Pals” category. Talkdesk, makers of a contact-center-as-a-service platform is the other company.
- Partners for established market leaders in specific areas. Nuance is a company in this category. They have been working to tightly integrate their ambient clinical voice solution, DAX, with Epic for a number of years. PressGaney is also in this category as a solution provider for consumer satisfaction surveys.
- Cornerstone Partners for products Epic uses in key ways in their software. Two long-time Epic partners are this category – InterSystems and Microsoft
In a written statement, Alan Hutchinson – Vice President at Epic had this to say: “The Partners and Pals program creates new value for healthcare by curating unique collaborations. Epic works with companies like Abridge to develop deep integration for their products and services, helping them innovate quickly for the benefit of more patients and providers.”
Epic Product Enhancements
After Faulkner’s keynote, a number of Epic leaders got on stage to present updates and make announcements for their specific products. These announcements were rapid-fire and met with applause from the audience:
- Slider Dicer NLP layer to allow researchers and clinicians to query the data using natural language like they would when talking to a colleague vs specific query language, available now
- URL Shortning & Engagement tracking for Cheers (Epic’s CRM), powered by Hello World, coming in November 2023
- Epic Gallery – a new module for document management (clinical and non clinical documents), coming November 2023
- Conversational SMS for ticket scheduling, coming in Feb 2024
- Staff Scheduling and Optimization module – starting with Surgeons and then onto nurses, coming November 2024
- Automatic UI optimization – the system will automatically rearranges the layout based on how you use the system so that it optimizes performance and ease of use, coming 2024
- AI for operational optimization – the system will optimize operational capacity to maximize utilization of resources like ORs and may also make recommendations to surgeons on the optimal time for procedures based on availability of other resources + patient acuity, coming in the future
- Infusion templates and scheduling – the system will scan past appointment patterns and upcoming patient bookings to optimize scheduling of resources, coming in the future
- Optimizing length of stay by prioritizing tasks and resources based on past patterns and best practices, coming in the future
Editor’s note: This article was updated on 24 August 2023 with more information on Epic’s new partnership program. Details on the overall name of the program, “Showroom” was added.
