LAS VEGAS—At the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's (HIMSS') 2024 global conference, Seth Hain, senior vice president of R&D at Epic, predicted that artificial-intelligence-powered agents would be a major focus on the showroom floor at the next year's conference.
Hain's prediction was right on the money as AI agents dominated the conversations at the HIMSS 2025 Global Health Conference & Exhibition this week.
Electronic health record giant Epic is putting major investments into rapidly building out its AI capabilities including conversational AI features.
"We've woven AI into the foundational capabilities of Epic, and we've been working towards an agentic platform for the past year or so," Seth Howard, vice president of R&D at Epic, told Fierce Healthcare during an interview at Epic's massive booth.
"We're really building on the foundation that we created to have generative AI as part of the software to start building reusable components that can take action, understand information in the chart and help to automate certain things," Howard said.
The company, as one example, is developing conversational AI agents to help patients prepare for a medical appointment. "You can imagine getting a phone call or some interaction from the health system that's powered by a conversational AI agent asking what the goals of the visit are, and maybe some questionnaires you can look at. Are there missing tests, for example, that need to be done prior to the visit? The agent can then help the patient schedule those tests," he said.
The system will then summarize that information for both the patient and the physician. The AI can draw on information from across the enterprise to provide data-driven insights. AI agents may chat with patients about care goals and can analyze similar cases to identify potential treatment options or diagnostics that would be helpful for that patient, he noted.
"These agents will help do more of the work leading up to the visit to really help that visit be as productive, both for the patient and the clinician, as possible," Howard said.
The U.S. faces a significant shortage of primary care physicians. There are opportunities for AI agents to augment the workforce to help primary care physicians meet the ongoing demand for care.
As gen AI has gained momentum in the past two years, Epic has built gen AI capabilities into its EHR, with about 125 features now in development, he noted. "These are using the foundational models OpenAI, and we've created an infrastructure that we can use other models as well, but those are being built directly into Epic," he said.
The company developed MyChart in-basket augmented response technology, which automatically drafts responses to patient messages. At Epic's User Group Meeting back in August, CEO Judy Faulkner said the feature was in use at 150 healthcare systems and medical groups with 1 million drafts generated each month.
Epic sees opportunities to use gen AI to improve clinician workflows, enhance patient experiences, streamline revenue cycle processes and accelerate important clinical interventions. "In the clinician space, we're creating summaries for physicians and nurses across a variety of use cases. A primary care physician who's seeing a patient can get a summary of what's happened since they've last seen that patient with AI, giving that summary and then citing back the various parts of the chart that we pulled the information from, all the way to specialty specific summaries, inpatient rounding summaries, what's happened in the last 12 or 24 hours, and helping to draft a hospital discharge note," Howard said.
"You'll see these things pop up throughout the software, whether it's summarizing or drafting different parts of documentation to speed up the process of charting and reviewing information for clinicians," he added.
About two-thirds of providers on Epic are using gen AI features within the EHR. Healthcare organizations using the gen AI features are reporting that clinicians are saving time doing administrative work. At the Mayo Clinic, which first went live with the feature, nurses are saving an average of 30 seconds per message, Howard noted.
"We hear a few different types of outcomes. Some of it is sort of hard RO (return on investment), or hard stats on time saved. Some of it is more of the soft ROI, like the feeling of reduced cognitive load or reduced burden, and it's harder to quantify those things. But we hear all the time, physicians will say, 'I could never go back to how things were done before.' We've heard at least one, maybe multiple, say, 'It saved my marriage,' because they were no longer bringing charting home," he said. "I think we'll see a good set of outcomes around efficiency and time saved, and a good set of outcomes around workforce retention and job satisfaction across the clinical community."
Epic has been co-developing technologies, including AI ambient technologies, with third-party vendors through its Epic Workshop program, starting with clinical documentation companies Nuance (DAX Copilot) and Abridge. That program has since expanded to include survey software company Press Ganey, Genesys, Qualtrics and digital contact center company Talkdesk.
"The goal with Workshop was to be able to move quickly. There were so many vendors in this space, so we listened very carefully to our customers in terms of what vendors saw as being the front-runners. We could work with a small number to rapidly develop something new. The goal had always been, once its stabilized, to release that to others through a more standard process using Toolbox," Howard said.
Another program, called Toolbox, highlights software categories with recommended practices for integration and the third-party apps that follow those recommendations, and that includes AI ambient scribe Suki and many other vendors.
Epic also is focused on advancements to help create richer clinician documentation. The company published specifications for ambient voice recognition, broadening integration options for note-writing workflows. The next step is native multimodal capabilities—processing video input, synthesizing voice into documentation, recognizing images and analyzing genomic data.
There is a growing list of healthcare apps that now integrate with Epic. More than 1,000 vendor-created apps are now live, including more than 200 new apps added in the past year. Epic’s Showroom currently hosts 790 apps and has welcomed 344 new listings since its launch in 2024. In that time, FHIR API usage surged from roughly 6 billion monthly calls to over 10 billion, according to the company.
Expanding its capabilities beyond the EHR
Epic has been expanding its reach to develop technology for clinical trials management, life sciences research, medical devices, specialty diagnostic labs, supply chain and payers.
The company's upcoming clinical trials management system will unify trial workflows for patients, clinicians, researchers and administrators.
The health IT giant also is developing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite. A natively integrated Epic ERP will collect financial, operational and clinical data in one unified system, Epic executives said.
"Our customers have expressed a need for an ERP solution that’s integrated with their EHR, and we are responding to that demand," Howard said.
With the same system for both EHR and ERP, the resource planning software can predict supply needs based on upcoming surgeries and case backlogs, he noted. The ERP also can analyze staffing metrics such as amount of overtime and predict future staffing needs based on EHR data.
"Epic’s implementation and support services are tailored to the needs of healthcare organizations. Implementation and support for Epic’s ERP will be provided by in-house Epic staff, just like our other applications," he said.
Epic's specialty diagnostics suite, Aura, simplifies provider access to genetic testing information. A growing number of diagnostic labs are now connected to Aura. And the platform has been expanded to Aura for medical devices.
The company also went live with Cosnome, which integrates genomic sequencing data into the Cosmos data set. Organizations that contribute to Cosmos will gain point-of-care insights from the combination of genomic information and clinical data to advance precision medicine and more personalized treatments. Researchers also can use it as a resource for studying genetic variants alongside real-world clinical outcomes.
At Epic's User Group Meeting in August, Faulkner touted a new service to improve the efficiency of surgical supplies and implants. This feature will enable better integration between surgical schedules in Epic and the manufacturers.