Needless to say, my first time at Epic UGM was quite the experience. The way that Epic takes over Verona and Madison is impressive. Plus, the campus is just as expansive and unique as you’ve read about. They said that the campus is 1700 acres with 40% of it still farmland. While the campus was interesting, what was most interesting for me was the volume of things that were announced at Epic’s user conference. Many of them were continuations of efforts that Epic had started previously, so there weren’t a lot of surprises, but the number of areas that Epic is working on is quite impressive. Not to mention the growth of Epic. Plus, as Judy Faulkner said on stage, Epic said they’d do something at last year’s UGM and they did.
Judy noted that 44,000 people were attending Epic’s UGM which included online attendees. Not sure how many were there in person, but the Deep Space venue I was in was almost full with a capacity of 11,400 people and I was told there were a number of overflow spaces. Plus, most of the 14,000 Epic employees were participating in the conference too. It’s kind of amazing that Epic chooses to hold UGM in Verona when another city would likely be more convenient for their users, but it does create a unique backdrop for the event.
While not a comprehensive list, here’s a look at some of the many announcements that Epic made at their user conference that I found worth noting.
Amazing AI Demo
The closest thing to a Wow moment beyond the overall Wow of everything they’re doing and Epic’s growth was a kind of speculative demo at the end of the opening keynote. They appropriately framed it as a demo of something way earlier than they usually demo something. It was meant to demo some of the capabilities of what’s possible when you combine Epic’s data and existing solutions together with the quickly evolving AI and generative AI to rethink how a healthcare organization could interact with patients. What’s amazing is that this wasn’t a vaporware fake demo. It was a real demo leveraging the technology. Certainly it’s far from production, but my point is that it wasn’t a bunch of powerpoint slides and doctored screenshots of what a new patient workflow could look like. It was an actual AI bot that had been created.
I hope they release video of the whole demo so you can see it yourself, but until then I’ll try and describe what happened. An Epic AI assistant within MyChart followed up with Seth Hain – SVP of R&D at Epic after a fictional wrist surgery. The chatbot asked how he was doing and using his voice Seth replied to the chatbot about his condition. The chatbot asked Seth to hold up his wrist to the camera so it could evaluate how much it could bend. Then, it analyzed the data from the video/pictures and compared his wrist’s recovery against others who have had a similar condition’s recovery (using Epic’s Cosmos data) and presented a chart of how his recovery compared. Then, the chatbot suggested that his recovery was ahead of schedule and so it asked if Seth if he wanted to cancel his follow up appointment. Seth agreed and the appointment was cancelled. The chatbot then saw in Seth’s patient record that he needed an appointment for an unrelated immunization and it asked him if he wanted to schedule an appointment for it. Seth agreed an an appointment was scheduled for the immunization.
No doubt there is plenty in the above demo workflow that could be considered risky, scary, and possibly even a little controversial. Plus, some of the technology needs to still be developed further like the AI image analysis of a person’s recovery post surgery. Just to be clear, Epic wasn’t necessarily espousing this specific workflow, but I think the demo was designed to stimuluate Epic’s users to think about how AI and access to data within Epic could allow for a wide variety of new ways to engage with patients. That’s what made the demo so exciting. It illustrated how many opportunities there are to leverage AI and Epic data to improve the patient experience. Although, it will take a mindset shift for many.
Epic Payer Platform
The Epic Payer Platform is the next biggest announcement in my view. The platform is free for health systems and over half of the Epic health systems are connected. Some of the features of Payer Platform are: connecting provider directories, transparency on medical policy and medical necessity, prior authorizations, claims denials, and more. Many of the biggest payers have gotten on the Epic Payer Platform. Plus, Epic has a Blue Ribbon program for Health plans that asks them to do the following:
- Using Clinical Data for Risk & Quality
- Using Clinical Data for Claims
- ADT Notifications
- Sharing Clinical Data Back
- Electronic Authorizations
- Coverage Finder
I’m confident we’ll here a lot more about Payer Platform in the future as Epic works to bridge the gap between providers and payers.
Unique Epic Installs
Another interesting announcement was the expansion of Garden Plot. For those not familiar with Garden Plot, it’s an Epic instance for small to medium sized group practices. They started with Primary Care and Orthopaedics and they announced that two more specialties are coming.
Another unique install was the state of Washington buying an instance of Epic to use across a wide variety of government healthcare organizations. It will be interesting to see how it goes across a really diverse set of users. Plus, it includes a number of unique care environments. However, on their own none of these organizations could have purchased Epic. So, the state purchasing a license made it possible for them all to be on Epic.
Epic Cosmos – Lookalikes and Best Care Choices
One of the coolest announcements was Epic’s efforts to push Cosmos data to the point of care. For those not familiar with Cosmos, it’s basically Epic’s product that aggregates Epic users’ data in a normalized fashion. If you share your data with Cosmos, then you get access to run reports on that data. However, it becomes even more powerful if that data gets pushed to the clinicians doing the care. Those efforts to push this data into the hands of clinicians is Lookalikes and Best Care Choices.
Lookalikes will take the data for a patient, often a patient with a rare condition, and search through Cosmos’ hundreds of millions of records to find other patients that have similar characteristics to your patient. Then, you can evaluate the patients it finds and even reach out to the doctor treating the patient that is similar to yours. Basically, it is doing at scale what many doctors have been doing on social media for a while when they have a complex patient. However, social media requests from doctors are driven by luck that you’ll find a peer that has a similar patient. Epic’s Lookalike feature leverages data to try and improve the peer connections that are made so they can better serve patients.
Best Care Choices on the other hand looks at a patient’s record in Epic and then shows the doctor how patients with similar diagnosis, symptoms, health history, etc etc etc are being treated by other clinicians. The clinician can then evaluate the treatments, medications, etc that are being done by other Epic users along with their own medical knowledge to assess what is the best treatment option for the patient. This solution is still being piloted and worked on, but it is easy to see how this data can help clinicians ensure they are providing the best care possible for the patient. That includes looking at patient reported outcomes for the treatments given by other Epic users.
Epic also noted that Cosmos is now ready to store genomics data in what they call the Cosnome. Pus, they announced Cosmo AI. They didn’t offer too many details on Cosmo AI, but the general idea of using Cosmo data to create a high quality healthcare AI makes a lot of sense. I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more about this in the future.
AI Projects
Epic is working on over 100 AI projects and so they didn’t spend all that much time talking about the details. They did note the quick uptake of ambient clinical voice solutions and their efforts to support it. Plus, Judy did tell their users that they had a custom report available for each of their customers which highlighted the AI features they were using and what else was available to them. Sounded like an interesting report.
One other AI feature they did talk some about was efforts to create more of a conversational search within Epic that provides a largely generative AI summary response. We’ve seen this feature being implemented in a lot of EHRs. Being able to summarize the key elements from all the information stored in the EHR is a big problem that many clinicians want solved.
In the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing a video interview I did with Epic’s Director of AI where we talk more about Epic’s AI efforts.
A Few Other Quick Hits
Epic seems to be making a big investment in Aura which focuses on helping to bring in the right data for precision medicine. They shared about all the progress they have made with Aura for specialty diagnostics and genomic data. Plus, they announced the first Aura for medical devices partner, Zio by iRythm, with CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitoring) coming next.
Judy said they’re working on better surgical device manufacture planning leveraging the Epic schedule.
The Epic Hello World product for texting is dong well and they’re adding email and planning to add voice and fax in the future. They said that it will be made intelligent to know if someone prefers a text, email, or call.
Judy announced that they are working on a new Blood Bank module. She suggested it was a large endeavor and may take some time to get it right.
The Cost Reduction Dashboard was shown. That didn’t seem like a new announcement as much as it was Judy informing people of it so they use it.
Judy highlighted the ability to personalize MyChart as she encouraged users to use the regular MyChart instance rather than creating their own custom instance.
Epic is working on physician directories which should be really interesting since it can be integrated into many of the other features like appointment scheduling in unique ways.
They said that they are working on a capacity based scheduling notification. For the rest of us, that’s basically a waitlist for cancelled appointments that can be used to backfill those cancellations.
Epic also offers the option to create proactive outreach campaigns. However, they are also working on tieing those camapaigns to micro sites that can be customized for those campaigns. They didn’t offer too much detail here, but it’s great to see Epic caring more about the healthcare marketing side of things.
Judy said they’re working on more comprehensive care journeys that patients can see in Epic MyChart. A pregnancy care journey is available now with more to come.
They also quickly mentioned other efforts to look at chronic disease trends, regional antibiotic resistance patterns, OR scheduling, staff scheduling, and physician scheduling. All of these are challenging issues that they are looking at to see how they can help healthcare organizations.
Judy also highlighted their work on a professional billing exchange to help with billing.
One of the biggest cheers from the crowd came when Judy talked about their work to create a Community Registries Platform to help automate registry submissions. A time consuming problem for most healthcare organizations.
MyChart can integrate with Apple and Google for devices and wearable, but they are exploring direct integrations with devices to get the data directly into MyChart. You could see a kind of “MyChart Inside” branding on devices that can push data to MyChart.
Summary
As you can see, they covered a lot of ground during the Epic keynote and I am sure I missed a lot of things in my summary. What was clear is that Epic is pushing forward in a wide variety of areas based on what they are hearing from their customers. If you were at the event or watching the live stream, what stood out to you? What announcement are you most interested in and why? Was there something you wished they’d announced that they didn’t? Let us know in the comments and on social media.
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