Epic touts new AI tools for patients and doctors at company's annual meeting

Visitors attend UGM 2025.Courtesy of EpicSpace travelers, robots and, of course, artificial intelligence.They were all on display on Tuesday at Epic Systems' annual Users Group Meeting, held at the health software giant's 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin.Judy Faulkner, Epic's 82-year-old CEO, dressed for the occasion in a purple wig with neon green shoes and an iridescent vest, reminiscent of the fictional character Buzz Lightyear from the "Toy Story" franchise.At the science fiction-themed event, Faulkner told the crowd that Epic has roughly 200 different AI features in development that aim to assist patients, clinicians and insurers."We are combining the intelligence and curiosity of the human being with the investigative capabilities of gen AI," Faulkner said, in front of thousands of health-care executives packed into an 11,400-seat underground auditorium.Epic, one of the largest private nology companies in the country, is best known for its electronic health record, or EHR, software

An EHR is a digital version of a patient's medical history that's d by doctors and nurses, and the nology is integral to the modern U.S. health-care system.Epic's software, which competes with Oracle Health (formerly Cerner), is used by 280 million Americans, according to the company

Many patients know of Epic because of its user portal called MyChart.Last week, Epic announced MyChart Central, which will allow patients to log in to MyChart with just one set of credentials, rather than needing a username and password for each health system they visit

It's equally helpful for health-care organizations, Faulkner said."You'll spend less time handling patient calls and resetting passwords," she said in her keynote on Tuesday. "Demographic changes address need to be added only once."A new addition to the MyChart portal is the always-on Emmie assistant, which the company said will be able to answer questions lab results, pose appointment times and suggest relevant screenings that patients can discuss with their doctor.During Epic's three-hour presentation, Faulkner and other executives introduced Emmie as well as other AI assistants the company calls Art and Penny, highlighting new capabilities that are coming in the next year and beyond.Health-care executives attend UGM 2025.Courtesy of EpicThe Art assistant is int for clinicians, and is meant to act as an active AI digital colleague, the company said

Art will be able to anticipate information that a doctor might need, for instance, and can pull up information blood pressure trends, a patient's family history and place orders.The company also said Art will be able to draft clinical notes, which was one of the most highly anticipated announcements ahead of the conference

AI-powered clinical documentation tools, which are often called AI scribes, can take notes on patient visits in real time as doctors record their encounters, with a patient's consent.AI scribes have exploded in ity as health-care executives for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads

Some startups in the space, including Abridge and Ambience Healthcare, have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors.Epic said its AI charting tool is being built in collaboration with Microsoft

Epic and Microsoft have been working closely together for roughly two decades, and Microsoft's DAX Copilot duct is already a offering within the AI scribing market."We're ud to be collaborating with Epic to explore how we can bring our core Dragon ambient AI nology to Epic's new AI Charting capability to further imve care dery," Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health & Life Sciences said in a statement.Epic's Penny assistant is designed to help with revenue cycle management and other administrative needs, such as generating appeal letters for insurance claims that get denied

It can also help speed up medical coding by serving up suggestions, Faulkner said

Those two features are already ."With all the challenges health-care organizations are facing, we need to make sure our clinicians and our organizations are strong and doing well in order to be able to take care of patients," Faulkner said.Epic closed out its executive address by teasing new AI capabilities that are coming to Cosmos, which is a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct re

Health systems have to opt-in to participate in Cosmos, and the database currently includes information from more than 1,760 hospitals and 300 million patients.Epic said it's building a set of prietary foundation models, called Cosmos AI, based on this data

The company is still evaluating different applications of the models, and launched the Cosmos AI Lab to help reers and data scientists learn more.Executives said the models could be used to predict a timeline of a patient's potential medical events, whether they're a readmission risk or could eventually experience a heart attack."We're finding that it continues to imve as it sees more patients," said Seth Hain, a senior vice president of re and development at Epic. "Having only used 8 billion encounters so far, we're just getting started."WATCH: The health care sector was overdue for a bouncewatch now4:2104:21Basham: The health care sector was overdue for a bounceWorldwide Exchange