The health care system finds itself adrift at sea, Epic Systems founder and CEO Judy Faulkner said Tuesday at the company’s annual Users Group Meeting.
The 80-year-old billionaire founder — dressed as a washed-up island explorer in torn clothes, beads and a feathered hat to match the conference’s “Castaway” theme — told the crowd of over 10,000 employees and partners of the health care software giant that health care systems are facing challenges like provider burnout, staffing shortages and provider and customer satisfaction. Epic is addressing these problems by providing more thorough training with software systems, connecting millions more patient records to data systems and reducing provider workload with the help of generative artificial intelligence.
The past few years have been “tumultuous” for providers and patients alike, Faulkner said, much like ocean storms battering a remote island.
“Things have washed away, health care staff have left, hospitals have closed, important services such as maternity have closed, access to many services has slowed down considerably — appointments may take months,” she said. “But we're going to make our new health care world better than it was before.”
Despite these hurdles, Epic has grown its staff, its research and development projects and its customer base. According to Faulkner, 178 million patients have their clinical records stored on Epic’s MyChart digital records system, a 15% increase from the previous year. Since the last Users Group Meeting in August 2022, 32 additional health care organizations from around the world have adopted Epic’s software, and another 36 are in the process of implementing Epic’s systems.
Additionally, Epic’s Cosmos, a research database of de-identified patients’ health information, has grown to include data from 210 million people. During the de-identification process, any data that may reveal the identity of the patient is removed, and experts review the data to ensure the patient’s anonymity. Cosmos allows researchers to use the large quantity of de-identified data for their projects, and it allows providers to more easily connect patients with rare conditions to each other or other providers.
To provide more thorough software training for Epic employees, the company is offering ongoing training for workers struggling with the software. Epic also announced the launch of Lyceum, a training program to help medical and nursing students learn Epic’s software.
AI’s future in health care
In between skits inspired by “Gilligan’s Island” and the movie “Cast Away,” Epic presenters expanded upon one of Epic’s most prominent new ventures: generative AI as a time-saving tool for providers.
With generative AI tools added to Epic’s software systems, the company hopes to allow providers to summarize recorded conversations with patients, create first drafts of reports and more quickly search medical and research databases. Using these AI time-saving tools, Faulkner said, would ease providers’ administrative workload and free up more of their time to provide direct care to patients.
Microsoft has long been a vendor of Epic, and the two have collaborated on research and engineering projects. Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said during the conference that AI technology could help reduce workload, but a human must always “be in the loop” in order to review any content the AI produces for accuracy. Additionally, the technology will be developed with “governance and oversight” principles to ensure “fairness and transparency” and address concerns that AI could be used to cause harm, he said.
“The same day that we are excited about what generative AI can do for us, we also have to sort out real world harms,” Nadella said. “We've been working at this in real time (developing) institutional strength in making sure that any AI model that we deploy has a real focus on AI safety... data and data safety, and who owns the data.”
But if used responsibly, Nadella said, AI could cause a “massive paradigm shift.”
“Technology for technology's sake is not that interesting,” he said. “But technology applied in a meaningful way on some of society's largest, biggest problems and challenges to improve the lives of people out there is going to be the most impactful thing.”
Expanding Epic’s connections
Epic also wants to expand the company’s databases of patients and allow for easier sharing of health information for research and treatment purposes.
The company announced the launch of Look-Alikes, a program that matches patients who have unidentified conditions with others who share similar symptoms in the hopes of facilitating efforts to provide more information or potential treatments for the conditions. The project is similar to Cosmos’ ability to allow providers to match patients with rare conditions.
Look-Alikes is part of Epic’s larger aim to make sharing health information easier, both between providers within the U.S. and between countries in which Epic operates. But that has raised concerns about patient privacy, especially with the risk of data breaches.
Jackie Gerhart, a UW Health family medicine clinician and member of the clinical informatics team at Epic Research, has been involved with Cosmos since 2020 and attended the conference. She said Cosmos takes precautions to ensure that data remains de-identified when in the hands of researchers and that patients’ data doesn’t leave Cosmos’ database.
“The goal of evidence-based medicine is to be able to drive insights without having any decrease in privacy, so that you can actually care for that patient again in a clinical way down the line with the troves of data that helps you inform that decision,” Gerhart said.
Epic is also the first electronic health records company to receive “discrete, actionable” genetic variant results from a laboratory, Faulkner said, and she wants to use genetic data to provide more precision care tools for patients.
Genetic test results are useful for providers in determining what medications will be effective or ineffective for a patient, as well as for what the appropriate dosage of any medications may be. Using this data will help providers tailor care better to individual patients’ needs, according to Faulkner.
“Going forward, we're going to make the health care world better than it was before,” Faulkner said.
