Roughly 7,000 of Epic's customers, many of them from health systems, visited the EHR vendor's sprawling headquarters in Verona, Wis., from Aug. 19-22 for the company's annual Users Group Meeting. Here are six highlights from the conference.
1. Artificial intelligence was the talk of Verona. As Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner reminded the audience during her executive address, all computers are effectively AI. But the technology has come a long way in the decades since Epic's founding, particularly in the last couple of years with the advent of generative AI.
Epic has been riding that tech wave as well, with more than 100 generative AI applications either having been released or in development.
"You are going to hear a lot about AI today. I mean, a lot," Epic senior vice president Sumit Rana said Aug. 20. "Our mission is to maximize use of AI across all areas, from clinical to administrative, while, of course, complying with evolving regulatory requirements."
One of the coolest features in the works is a conversational voice assistant in MyChart that patients can ask health-related questions in real time (think Alexa or Siri for healthcare).
Seth Hain, a research and development executive at Epic, demonstrated how it worked, talking with the AI about a fictional wrist injury. After the chatbot asked him to send a live picture of his wrist in MyChart, she responded that his recovery appeared to be progressing so well that he could cancel his upcoming virtual visit with a human physician (who Mr. Hain would still see in person in a few weeks).
Mr. Hain was asked when this type of platform might be live. Three years? Ten?
"Three years seems like a long time," he said. "This is moving really, really quickly."
As some actors illustrated in a Dr. Seuss-themed skit, patients can now schedule appointments on MyChart with the help of a text-based AI chatbot, have their appointment documented on Epic with ambient AI, then have AI find a similar patient elsewhere in the world whose provider their physician can consult with via the Look-Alikes platform.
2. Epic has gone international. The company hosted healthcare leaders from 17 countries at the event, and Epic's biggest-ever go-live recently took place at London-based Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, with 45,000 new users of the EHR.
And U.S. health systems are getting in on the action. Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health, for instance, supported the Epic implementation at the NHS as well as one at Insel Gruppe AG, a university hospital in Bern, Switzerland.
"Unlike other consulting organizations, we do patient care every day in all of our hospitals and clinics, so we have a really clear understanding most days of how best to leverage the technology," said Russ Hinz, vice president of strategic partnerships for Advocate Health, which now has an international EHR consulting business.
Also, an Epic Users Group Meeting for the Asia-Pacific region is in the works.
3. New health system customers abound. Epic welcomed 19 new U.S. health system clients at the event, including several that hadn't been reported previously, such as Minneapolis-based Children's Minnesota, Children's Mercy Kansas City (Mo.) and Lubbock, Texas-based UMC Health System.
The company's stranglehold on the EHR market — Epic was at 39.1% of U.S. hospitals, covering more than half of all hospital beds, in 2023 — appears to be tightening.
4. The Cosmos clinical informatics platform is growing. Epic's Cosmos research platform now includes deidentified data from 270 million patient records. A Cosmos-based program called Best Care Choices that gives treatment recommendations to providers is in testing. "This is huge and a game-changer for medicine," said Mark Mabus, MD, chief medical informatics officer and EHR vice president at Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Parkview Health, one of the testing sites.
"A lot of organizations struggle with having a common data repository," said Sargon Yacoub, senior director of academic research and computing for Chicago-based Rush University System for Health. "So being able to have a repository like Cosmos, with deidentified data, with … self-service functionality, is a huge win for us."
5. MyChart is expanding. As Epic leaders noted at the event, many people now have a MyChart account from birth, including 40% of newborns and 580,000 babies under the age of 1.
But users can better protect their data with multifactor authentication, which is not activated on 10 million active MyChart accounts, said Stirling Martin, a senior vice president at Epic.
MyChart is the No. 1 healthcare app with 190 million users, Ms. Faulkner noted during her executive address. She recommended that health systems keep the MyChart brand name for their patient portals as patients often search for it when they move to a new city.
6. Epic is moving beyond hospitals. The EHR vendor touted its payer platform, which connects health systems with payers directly on the Health Grid, as well as its Aura precision medicine program that loops in specialty diagnostic labs.
What is tying all these programs back together? AI, of course.
Truly realizing the potential of AI will require everyone from providers to payers to Epic to work together, Mr. Rana said. "We're headed for a battle of AI versus AI, unless we change course," he said, pointing to a meeting on prior authorizations and denials between St. Louis-based Mercy and payer Elevance Health as a step in the right direction.
"We've woven Cosmos, MyChart and the Health Grid into all of our software, and as they continue to grow in scale, so does the potential for meaningful impact," he added. "And they're getting turbocharged with AI."