During its annual user conference at its headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin, Epic Systems unveiled a series of new AI capabilities designed to improve patient care, support clinicians and optimise administrative processes. Led by founder and CEO Judy Faulkner, the company made clear that it is strongly committed to generative AI as a building block for the future of digital healthcare.
Epic is currently working on around 200 AI features, several of which will be rolled out this year. The focus is on smart assistance for both patients and healthcare providers. One of the most notable innovations is the integration of AI assistant Emmie into the MyChart patient portal. Emmie can answer questions about lab results, recommend screenings and schedule appointments. This continuous availability enables personalised patient interaction outside of office hours.
AI assistants
Epic also introduced two AI assistants for clinical practice and administration: Art and Penny. Art was developed as a digital AI colleague for healthcare professionals. The assistant supports doctors by proactively providing relevant information, such as trends in blood pressure or family medical history, and can generate clinical notes based on consultation conversations. This functionality was developed in collaboration with Microsoft, which is already an established name in the field of AI scribes with Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX) Copilot.
Penny focuses on the administrative side of healthcare and helps, among other things, to generate appeals for rejected insurance claims and speed up medical coding. Both functions are now live and are being tested in several healthcare institutions.
Anonymised dataset
Another important pillar of Epic's AI strategy is Cosmos, a comprehensive, anonymised dataset containing information on more than 300 million patients from 1,760 hospitals. Epic is currently using this to develop its own foundation models under the name Cosmos AI, which are used to build predictive models for clinical decision-making, such as readmission risks or predicting cardiovascular events.
The increasing adoption of generative AI in healthcare is accompanied by high expectations. According to Faulkner, it is crucial that technological innovations actually support healthcare providers in their daily practice. ‘Our AI solutions are designed to combat burnout, reduce administrative burdens and improve the quality of care.’
Epic's vision reflects a broader trend in healthcare: technology as the foundation for future-proof, personalised and efficient patient care.
