Photo: HIMSS Media
EHR giant Epic is reporting at HIMSS26 that more than 85% of its clients now use Epic AI. The company is discussing with exhibit hall attendees what this embrace of artificial intelligence means for health systems, clinicians and patients – and where the influential records system maker is headed.
A flair for Art
Epic's AI for clinicians is dubbed Art. The goals for the technology are to bring joy to the practice of medicine and help patients get treatment sooner, the company said. With Art, care teams have saved thousands of hours of charting time while learning more than ever about their patients, it added.
The company is reporting that clinicians at multiple organizations are completing discharge summaries 20-30% faster with Art's Draft Hospital Course Notes. At Riverside Health in Virginia, for example, clinicians using Art's Inpatient Insights are spending up to 32% less time on documentation and communication tasks.
Further, Art is helping patients start lung cancer treatment at earlier stages – at The Christ Hospital, for instance, Art extracts incidental findings from radiology results and drives follow-up, delivering an early detection rate of 69% for lung cancer versus the national average of 46%, Epic said. That can mean catching cancer when it's still treatable for more patients.
RCM and ops
The EHR vendor designed Art to work hand in hand with Penny, Epic's AI for revenue cycle and operations. The goal is to cut through the complexity of prior authorization, an historically time-consuming process for both patients and clinicians.
For example, at Summit Health, Penny has cut medication prior authorization submission time by 42%, and 92% of AI-generated responses are accepted without edits, Epic reported. This means patients get answers faster and clinicians experience less administrative friction, it added.
At health systems most actively using Penny, coding-related denials have dropped by more than 20% – preventing revenue loss due to claim rejections and reducing the need for staff to spend time reworking claims, the company said. In addition, organizations are creating denial appeal letters 23% faster with Penny, it continued.
Patients get AI, too
Emmie is Epic's AI for patients. At Rush University Medical Center, Emmie has delivered a sustained 58% reduction in billing-related customer service messages, the company said. This frees staff to focus on the most complex cases, while patients get answers to straightforward questions immediately.
Emmie is designed to help patients schedule and reschedule appointments. At Ochsner Health, for example, patients have rescheduled more than 14,900 appointments so far with Emmie, making scheduling more convenient and saving almost 750 hours of staff time, Epic reported.
By reviewing detailed clinician documentation and providing patient-friendly conversational follow-ups, Emmie helps patients adhere to their care plans – with a 94% satisfaction rate among patients using Emmie for these follow-up reminders, the company added.
More to come
Epic has plans to expand its use of AI across clinical, patient-facing and operational workflows.
Features on the way include:
• Conversational AI for clinicians. As Art listens to the patient visit, it will surface answers to questions that the clinician and patient ask – handling direct questions and inferred questions based on conversational context.
• Collaborative visit agendas. Art and Emmie will build visit agendas together, bringing questions and priorities from the patient and clinician into one view.
• Agent Factory. Epic will be releasing a platform for creating and monitoring AI agents that reason, decide and act across workflows. Agent actions are traceable, and organizations will be able to customize agents with a visual builder, equip them with local policies and knowledge bases, and deploy them on their own timeline.
• Diagnosis Checker. At the point of care, Art will help clinicians with differential diagnosis by analyzing patterns in patient symptoms, history and outcomes – and suggest potential next steps based on real-world patient data.
Epic is in the HIMSS26 exhibit hall in booth 12713.
Follow Bill's health IT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
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