Epic, Microsoft team up to let AI help answer medical questions

VERONA, Wis. (WMTV) - Verona-based health care software company Epic Systems announced Monday they are partnering with Microsoft to develop AI technology aiming to improve patient wait times.

Epic explained their collaboration with Microsoft will attempt to address the uptick in patient messaging in telehealth services. Implementing AI technology into health services would help providers edit and send messages to their patients faster.

Jackie Gerhart, the Vice President of Clinical Informatics at Epic, said that AI would improve clinical efficiency by addressing the increase in patients’ messages to their clinicians that has continued since the height of the pandemic.

Generative AI would draft messages for clinicians to send to their patients, a process that is easier on the clinician and faster for the patient. With AI’s assistance, clinicians would no longer have to forage through patient information when drafting messages.

“We really want to be sure that clinicians are feeling supported, and this is a great new technology to help that,” Gerhart said.

Because some people may not be comfortable getting their answers straight from a machine, Gerhart explained that humans will be a part in the AI-assisted communication between clinicians and patients as seen in UW Health’s current testing.

“As we learn more from clinicians using it, we will be able to make modifications to help make it even better across other users,” Gerhart said.

Epic also intends to address AI’s highly scrutinized racial bias, an issue that Gerhart said is rooted in a model’s development. One algorithmic bias study by Harvard University determined that algorithms can exacerbate social inequities.

In addition to humans staying in the loop and correcting concerns before further development, Gerhart underscored the importance of ensuring the information and people making the model are diverse.

UW Health, UC San Diego Health and Stanford Health Care are among the first organizations testing AI-generated message responses.

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