Epic has teamed up with Microsoft to integrate large language model tools and artificial intelligence (AI) into its electronic health record (EHR) software.
The partnership builds on an already existing collaboration between Epic and Microsoft, now expanding to focus on combining the Azure OpenAI service with Epic's EHR software. The aim is to leverage generative AI to support healthcare providers to increase productivity with less administrative burden, allowing healthcare providers to focus on patient care. In terms of EHR, generative AI can be applied to automatically fill in missing information, suggest diagnoses, and predict future health outcomes.
"Our expanded partnership builds on a long history of collaboration between Microsoft, Nuance and Epic, including our work to help healthcare organisations migrate their Epic environments to Azure," Eric Boyd, corporate vice president said in a statement.
The potential benefits of the application of generative AI in healthcare are significant, however, there are also potential risks, for example the risk of bias if the algorithms are trained on incomplete or biassed datasets. Microsoft and Epic are looking to mitigate these risks by developing transparent and ethical AI solutions that have been rigorously tested and validated.
UC San Diego Health, UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and Stanford Health Care, are among the health systems deploying the integrated systems, utilising Epic to automatically draft message responses.
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