Epic is continuing its push to develop products outside of the electronic health record.
At the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society conference on Tuesday, the company said it was creating tools to help health systems manage a variety of functions related to staffing, procurement and accounts payable. The company also introduced at the conference a patient-facing artificial intelligence tool that will embed in its EHR.
Related: How Epic is courting customers outside of hospitals
Epic is building off an initiative it started in August 2023 to help health systems manage clinician scheduling. The company will create a full enterprise resource planning software program that pits it against established vendors in the space such as Oracle and Workday.
Enterprise resource planning software manages and interprets data to help businesses make decisions on core functions such as human resources, supply chain and procurement. While Epic is in the early stages of product development, the goal is to deliver software that is purpose built for hospitals and health systems, said Seth Howard, Epic executive vice president of research and development.
“We are building our [enterprise resource planning tool] as healthcare focused from the ground up," Howard said. "Most [enterprise resource planning] systems out there today are built to be industry agnostic. They're used in healthcare, but they're also used in many other industries.”
The company is dividing the software program into three core categories focused on workforce, finance and materials. The tools will likely include applications for payroll and attendance tracking in human resources; accounts payable and ledger software in finance; supply chain management and medical supply procurement in materials.
Epic will release individual components as they are ready, Howard said. He declined to provide a date when the full software would be ready for customers but said Epic has already completed the first version of its staff scheduling tool with initial test customers have begun implementing it. A company spokesperson declined to name initial customers testing the product.
"We recognize some customers will want to go [with] more of a big bang and sort of wait until we have a more comprehensive solution," Howard said. "We don't have a timeline for that yet."
Epic also announced at HIMSS it was joining a growing list of healthcare companies deploying AI agents, which are tools that let the technology handle time intensive tasks. Epic said its tools will be embedded in the EHR and can chat with patients about their care goals, schedule labs ahead of a primary care appointment or help providers refill prescriptions based on patient messages.
The company said the goal is to release the tools sometime this year but declined to share a specific date. The agents will be available to customers that pay for Epic’s cloud platform.
