In an underground auditorium packed with thousands of healthcare executives this week, Judy Faulkner, CEO of Epic Systems, took the stage to deliver a keynote speech wearing a swan costume complete with feathers.

Even by the more relaxed standards of the tech industry (take NVIDIA Faulkner’s costume (the leather jacket that is CEO Jensen Huang’s trademark, for example) may have confused some first-time attendees. But for many healthcare industry veterans and Epic employees, it was business as usual – a sign that Epic’s annual Users Group Meeting had officially begun. And one theme stood out during the healthcare company’s event on Tuesday: how new artificial intelligence features can help doctors and patients.

Epic is a healthcare software giant whose technology is used in thousands of U.S. hospitals and clinics. The company manages the medical records of more than 280 million people in the U.S., although patients’ data is often stored with multiple providers.

Wizards and animals

Every year, thousands of people flock to Epic’s headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin, to learn about the company’s latest products and initiatives. UGM is one of the company’s largest annual events on campus, and CNBC was on hand for the festivities on Tuesday.

Epic’s 1,600-acre campus is filled with farm animals, wizard statues and buildings themed around “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Fittingly, this year’s conference is themed “story time,” and Faulkner and other Epic executives spoke as characters from various children’s books.

There was no shortage of skits and jingles as they shared updates on Epic’s key products, including offerings like MyChart, an app that allows patients to access their medical records, and Cosmos, an anonymized patient dataset that doctors can use for research.

Epic’s Artificial Intelligence Announcements

Many of Epic’s announcements revolved around how the company is integrating artificial intelligence into these products. Faulkner said the company is working on more than 100 AI features, although many of the tools are still in early development.

For example, by the end of this year, Epic plans to use its generative AI to help doctors translate responses to messages, letters and instructions into language that patients can understand. Doctors can use AI to automatically queue prescription and lab orders, the company said.

Many physicians must complete time-consuming tasks, such as drafting appeal letters against insurance denials or reviewing authorization requests, so Epic said the company is working to launch AI tools this year that could streamline those processes.

By the end of 2025, Epic’s generative AI will be able to pull the results, medications and other details a doctor may need when responding to a patient’s message through MyChart, the company said. More specific features, such as using AI to calculate wound measurements from images, will also be available next year.

Epic announced plans for a new staff scheduling application for doctors and nurses called Teamwork, which is coming soon. In addition, Faulkner said Epic is “exploring” how it could enable claims to be submitted directly through its software, without the need for a middleman like a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could mark a major shift in how insurance claims are processed across the healthcare industry.

Whether all of these features will actually be implemented – and whether health systems will actually use them – is not yet known. Nevertheless, Epic ended its presentation on Tuesday with a sophisticated demo that showed where the company wants to go with its technology.

The future

Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, hosted the demo. He spoke to an AI agent via the MyChart app about his recovery from what he thought was wrist surgery and answered questions about his pain. The agent instructed Hain to turn on his camera and bend his wrist backwards so the progress of his healing could be assessed. The agent said Hain’s wrist extension was about 60 to 75 degrees, meaning his recovery was faster than planned compared to data from similar patients in Epic’s Cosmos database.

Hain asked the agent if he could start playing pickleball again, and the agent told him to “wait a little longer.”

In a meeting with reporters after the presentation, Hain said the demo runs in real time without human intervention. However, this feature is so new that Epic doesn’t even have a name for it yet, and Hain said it will likely be a few years before it’s widely available.

“It’s still very, very, very early days as to whether and how society, the broader medical community, will adopt these kinds of things, but it’s doable,” he said.