Electronic health record giant Epic rolled out a new initiative to propel the adoption of generative artificial intelligence tools among providers.
Called Launchpad, the program helps organizations, working alongside Epic experts, quickly operationalize gen-AI-assisted workflows, the company announced in a recent LinkedIn post. The program offers guided AI implementations and a fast track to live workflows, the company said.
Epic kicked off Launchpad to help organizations adopt gen AI broadly and make it easier for organizations to "turn on" gen AI tools, said Sean McGunigal, director of AI at Epic, during an interview with Fierce Healthcare.
"We found that generative AI encounters a little bit of roadblocks in turning on and using it effectively and monitoring. For an organization that might not be totally familiar with an AI implementation, those roadblocks can become stall-outs, where an organization hits something and then the project never moves forward," he said.
Through the Launchpad program, Epic staff act as "shepherds" to help those organizations "get through the roadblocks, get the use cases configured, turned on and operationalized and have the right governance structures," McGunigal said.
Organizations have varying degrees of "AI literacy," McGunigal noted, and unfamiliarity with the technology can be a hurdle to wider adoption.
Setting up the appropriate governance framework also can slow down progress on gen AI initiatives.
"Governance has existed at healthcare organizations for quite some time, and it was attuned to what I would consider is pre-generative AI forms of AI, so AI that's very statistical driven. You've got empirical performance characteristics, which are a bit different from generative AI, where it might be more like user-assistive tools and less like clinical decision support tool. They might be expecting to get information, thinking it's kind of an older form of AI, and not able to get that with generative AI. So, we try to help organizations in that setting update the governance process to account for some of these new generative AI paradigms," he said.
In many cases, organizations may just need a champion to help guide the implementation of AI projects.
"That can be a good place for Epic to step in as well and just say, 'We'll help coordinate. We'll get the right stakeholders on the phone and we'll help this thing along.' The roadblocks tend not to be necessarily performance challenges or end user training. It tends to be the project management-type work," he said.
Epic rolled out its first gen AI use case in April 2023 with MyChart In-Basket Augmented Response Technology (ART), an AI-powered tool integrated into Epic EHR. The tool assists clinicians in drafting responses to patient messages.
Currently, 180 Epic customers are using ART, and 377 are using at least one gen AI feature from Epic, according to the company. That shakes out to roughly one-quarter of Epic customers using the In-Basket gen AI specifically and more than half using at least one gen AI feature.
The Launchpad program features a starter kit of 10 gen AI use cases to help organizations move from idea to operational gains "in a matter of days," according to Epic's LinkedIn post.
"This is a group of generative AI features that we think every organization really should turn on basically immediately. These are features that have had the highest impact and the highest outcomes," McGunigal said. "These features cross different areas of the health system. There are some that are provider-facing. There are some that are back-end facing. There are others that are small tools that everyone can take advantage of. So it covers a lot of different users within the system."
Epic is putting major investments into rapidly building out its AI capabilities. The company sees opportunities to use gen AI to improve clinician workflows, enhance patient experiences, streamline revenue cycle processes and accelerate important clinical interventions. At the HIMSS25 conference in March, Epic executives said the company had 125 gen AI features in development.
"It comes down to the outcomes that we're seeing. We were very deliberate with the initial generative AI use cases to be solving problems. We don't want to just have shiny, cool tools for providers to use," McGunigal said. "We know there's a problem in the system, and we know that generative AI is one of, if not the only, way to solve that problem."
Healthcare organizations using the gen AI features are reporting that clinicians are saving time doing administrative work. Mayo Clinic uses generative AI to draft responses to patient messages, and initial pilots showed that it saves nurses around 30 seconds per message and drafts more empathetic responses, Epic executives told Fierce Healthcare at the HIMSS25 conference in March.
Seth Howard, vice president of R&D at Epic, told Fierce Healthcare during an interview at HIMSS25 that Epic is now focused on building agentic AI.
"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," Howard said. "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."
"Agents are a new development paradigm when it comes to deploying generative AI, and it's going to offer more flexibility, more configurability and personalization, and ultimately, I think a lot more use cases than generative AI," McGunigal said. "We think that with a lot of the work that we're doing on the platform side for supporting agents, the potential to leverage generative AI to streamline a lot of workflows in the system is immense."