The big headlines coming out of Epic's Users Group Meeting last week centered on new artificial intelligence capabilities and Cosmos Curiosity. But executives also shared other interesting developments about Epic's push into AI-powered clinical decision support and its cybersecurity initiatives.
Stirling Martin, Epic's chief security officer, confirmed during the executive address on Tuesday that Epic is participating in Anthropic's Project Glasswing, an AI cybersecurity initiative that brings together major technology companies along with organizations responsible for maintaining critical digital infrastructure. At the center of the project is Anthropic's unreleased Claude Mythos model that partner organizations are using to find software vulnerabilities and strengthen defensive security, according to Anthropic.
Anthropic announced 50 initial partners April and then expanded the project in June to include organizations representing industries not well represented in its initial cohort, including power, water, healthcare, communications and hardware, the company said.
"This year, we pointed these advanced AI models at our own code. Despite a codebase that is several 100 million lines large, AI models can easily make observations that our expert developers can't see. In each successive model, the AI gets better and better at finding potential vulnerabilities, and that's stringing unrelated issues together into a novel attack path. These are not obvious issues, but the nuanced interplay between unrelated parts of the software," Martin told the audience at UGM.
Martin said health system IT teams should continue to expect to see a "higher-than-usual number of urgent security fixes" from Epic. "We're moving fast because speed is the whole game now, and these tools have given us a head start. It's part of our commitment to you to build things that last on infrastructure you can count on. We're not alone in this. Across the tech sector, critical security patches have surged this spring and summer," he said.
In the clinical decision support space, Epic is deepening its partnership Wolters Kluwer's UpToDate, the legacy CDS solution that's been on the market for 30 years. (During a "blink and you'll miss it" moment during UGM, executives briefly showed a slide that mentioned UpToDate but executives didn't go into details on stage).
Catching up with Yaw Fellin, senior vice president and general manager of clinical decision support and provider solutions at Wolters Kluwer Health, after UGM wrapped, he confirmed to Fierce Healthcare that Epic has integrated the UpToDate clinical reference database directly into Art, its native clinician-facing AI assistant.
"If you think about Epic bringing together a number of different components for clinicians at the point of care, some of that is their Best Care Choices for My Patient work that's built off of Cosmos, some of that is organizational guidelines. The new component and the focus of our partnership is trusted evidence-based content," Fellin said.
Epic and UpToDate's joint customers can now access UpToDate's clinical evidence within the Art AI copilot. "That provides a much more powerful, deeper workflow integration of what customers can do from an UpToDate perspective as they're working through clinical decisions in Art," Fellin noted.
UpToDate has been a tool that clinicians actively search and reference. Through this partnership with Epic, the company's content can now serve as a building block within Epic’s AI ecosystem, including Chart with Art and Agent Factory. Health systems can bring trusted clinical guidance directly into the AI tools and workflows they’re building, according to the companies.
"There's incredible customer demand. At a high level, what customers ask for is very deep workflow integration. This partnership will allow us to integrate much more deeply into the Epic workflows via Art. It's going to make the experience much more seamless for clinicians and, alongside the guidance that Epic is providing, it's going to present our evidence in context as clinicians are looking to make clinical decisions within their workflow," Fellin noted.
The partnership with the electronic health record company will expand beyond the Art clinical AI copilot, he noted, including Agent Factory, Epic's platform for building and deploying agentic AI.
"Agent Factory is going to allow hospitals and health systems to build and customize agents. For agents, where there is an evidence-based clinical decision support component, being able to access the UpToDate information is a tremendous value-add, and in some cases that could open up a wealth of use cases," Fellin said. "Given the different ways that we're going to allow UpToDate to be integrated within the Epic ecosystem, you can see how this grows pretty broadly over time."
In October, Wolters Kluwer unveiled UpToDate Expert AI, a gen-AI-powered version of its CDS solution. Wolters Kluwer says it's the next evolution of UpToDate, which has more than 3 million clinician users working at thousands of hospitals. The company aims to meet clinicians' need for the speed and power of gen AI with reliable medical knowledge, executives said at the time.
UpToDate's medical knowledge database is reviewed and developed by 7,600 expert clinicians. UpToDate also has more than 50 in-house physician deputy editors who are part of the team of medical experts responsible for producing and updating the resource.
The clinical decision support space has become a battleground in the health tech market as companies race to be the backend intelligence engine. OpenEvidence, a startup founded in 2022, developed an AI-powered medical search engine and gen AI chatbot exclusively for doctors that summarizes and simplifies evidence-based medical information. The company has expanded from clinical search into other clinical workflows, including a Visits feature an AI-integrated doctor dialer feature and a medical coding tool.
Startup Abridge also is moving aggressively into the decision support market as it grows from being an AI scribe to functioning as an enterprise AI assistant for clinicians. The company said last week that 300 enterprise health systems have adopted its AI-based decision support solution, and the company is now making the tool available to every clinician at its partner health systems.