In the future, MyChart, Epic’s popular patient portal, could help patients manage their overall health or send them personalized health reminders. The company is even testing a bot that could use MyChart as a replacement for a doctor’s visit in some cases.

Epic executives touched on some of the new AI-generated features at their annual user group meeting on Tuesday, as about 12,000 people filled the Deep Space Auditorium as part of the week-long conference. Another 32,000 people, including Epic employees and healthcare professionals around the world, tuned in to CEO Judy Faulkner’s address to hear about developments for the popular patient interface MyChart and clinician-focused programs.

“If you think we’ve done a lot of creative new things in the last few years, hold on to your hat,” Faulkner said. “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

For patients, AI will likely change the way they use MyChart in the coming years. Instead of using it regularly to sign up for appointments and pay bills, Epic hopes patients will use MyChart more as a general health management tool.

In future versions of MyChart, the AI ​​will recommend certain actions to patients, such as the annual flu shot, or give them a checklist to prepare for surgery. MyChart will also connect to wearable medical devices, such as heart monitors or constant glucose monitors for patients with arrhythmias or diabetes.

And still in early testing is a bot embedded in MyChart that could replace some in-person or virtual doctor visits. At a demonstration of the technology — which doesn’t yet have a release date but could be ready in a few years — the auditorium was silent among Epic employees as they spoke to the bot about how they felt while recovering from hypothetical wrist surgery.

Employees answered questions about their pain levels, turned on the camera to show the bot how far they could bend their wrist back, and asked for advice on whether they could play pickleball.

And while the AI ​​bot did not yet approve a trip to court, it was able to assess the range of motion as a sign of good progress and communicated that it would prompt the employee’s care team to decide whether an upcoming check-in was necessary as progress was being made.

Epic’s focus on integrating AI isn’t new—it’s had thousands of machine learning features in its software for years. But the launch of ChatGPT in 2022 sparked Epic’s desire to quickly integrate more AI into its products and was a major theme at last year’s conference.

Just four years ago, Epic launched Cosmos, its data and research software with 270 million anonymized patient records; last year, doctors wrote the first AI-generated messages to patients.

Numerous hospital systems across the country and around the world are already using Epic’s AI software to listen to patient visits with consent, create visit summaries, queue medication orders for physician approval, and monitor patients at risk of falls using cameras in hospital rooms.

For clinicians and support staff in hospitals, AI integration can streamline tedious tasks, identify staff shortages, and help doctors make accurate diagnoses and medication decisions using Epic’s research platform.

A major new initiative announced Tuesday aims to provide clinicians with AI-powered, evidence-based information to improve diagnosis, recommend treatment plans and predict whether a patient’s health will improve or worsen based on a treatment plan and its adherence.

Epic’s Cosmos platform allows doctors to identify patients with similar characteristics. Using the database, doctors can research which medications might be a good fit for their patients or narrow down what type of diagnostic tests should be tried first.

Epic also plans to expand its Health Grid data-sharing platform, which is designed to bring together a patient’s care teams from different hospitals, clinics and other medical practices, such as dentists. Through that program, Epic’s software has alerted healthcare providers to potential negative drug interactions 78 million times since last August, “saving a number of lives,” Faulkner said.

By adding insurance companies and other healthcare payers to the Health Grid, Epic now hopes to reduce the number of denied authorizations and provide patients with faster care, Faulkner said.

“It’s been an incredibly busy year, creating new connections across the healthcare network, helping to figure out how healthcare systems can thrive, improving patient care, conducting research, and working with generative AI as a great new tool,” Faulkner said. “We’re happy to say that pretty much everything we promised last year has been delivered.”