Electronic health record vendor Epic Systems will ramp up its artificial intelligence capabilities in 2025, one executive said Tuesday at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas.
Mike Pontillo, implementation executive at Epic, said the company is looking at expanding AI use cases for its health system customers. It has developed AI for patient-clinician messaging but will expand into billing use cases such as automating claim denial appeals in the coming year, he said. Overall, the EHR vendor is focusing on how the technology can be applied to different areas of the healthcare system.
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“It’s about trying to figure out what are the use cases that'll free people up to practice at the highest level either for their license or their role,” Pontillo said. “We don't necessarily need a nurse to call a patient and remind them about their colonoscopy. That’s something that could be automated.”
Pontillo also helps oversee Epic’s Showroom program, which the company launched in January as a way to connect with third-party vendors across a few categories. A few select vendors such as clinical documentation companies Abridge and Microsoft subsidiary Nuance have used the program to co-develop new technologies with Epic.
Showroom is an overhaul of how Epic is having its provider customers interact with third-party vendors. Since the launch, Pontillo said health system customers and even other vendors are happy with Showroom.
In the coming months, Epic is planning to add a new category called room AI monitoring, which can include companies that use sensors to identify fall risks.
"Our goal is to work with vendors in that space that are also manufacturing their own devices and really being able to consolidate what our customers need for a smart hospital room," Pontillo said.
Some of the company's practices have been under fire lately after startup Particle Health filed an antitrust lawsuit in September alleging Epic uses its market power to prevent products that would compete with the EHR company's payer platform.
Regarding the antitrust lawsuit, Pontillo referred to a Sept 24 statement from an Epic spokesperson who said Particle’s claims are baseless.
Pontillo also pushed back on the idea from some of Epic's competitors that the company is the biggest obstacle to interoperability.
"We are at the forefront of interoperability. ... We have more than 800 standards-based [application programming interfaces] that are available interfaces and we've had more than 500 billion data exchanges over the past year with those APIs," Pontillo said. "Anyone with the appropriate access approval can establish a connection with our customers."
