The News: In news out of HIMSS 2023 being held in Chicago this week, Microsoft and Epic announced an expansion of their partnership and the integration of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service into Epic’s EHR software. Read more from Healthcare IT News.
Microsoft and Epic Partner for OpenAI EHR Integration
Analyst Take: The announcement from Microsoft and electronic EHR software vendor Epic coming out of the HIMSS 2023 event was not surprising, all things considered. The expansion of the long-standing partnership between the companies, which facilitates the deployment of Epic environments on the Azure platform is a no-brainer.
The more exciting and totally expected news is the integration of Microsoft Azure’s OpenAI service into Epic’s EHR software. At a time when pretty much every organization across every vertical is exploring the benefits and opportunities generative AI provides, this partnership makes perfect sense. These companies, both of whom have long been immersed in and developing solutions for the healthcare space working together to accelerate the adoption of gen AI into healthcare means a speedier path to better outcomes for patients and greater internal efficiencies and better customer experiences for the organizations using these solutions.
What the Microsoft OpenAI Epic EHR Integration Will Do
This integration of OpenAI into Epic’s EHR software extends natural language queries and interactive data analysis to Epic’s self-service reporting tool SlicerDicer. That’s where the productivity enhancements come in. Perhaps more importantly, this should significantly enhance patient care.
Worth noting, this is already in market to some degree. One of the integration’s tools, which helps automatically draft message responses, is already underway at UC San Diego Health, UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and Stanford Healthcare.
Beyond enhancing patient care and introducing efficiencies into the system leading to enhanced productivity, the introduction of OpenAI EHR solutions within the Epic EHR should be a hit with CFOs, as Microsoft and Epic believe it will improve health system financial integrity and identify opportunities for operational improvements. For example, OpenAI EHR can be used to automatically fill in missing information, suggest diagnoses, and even predict future health outcomes based on historical data. This will be invaluable to health systems and hospitals that have been challenged to address pressures on costs and margins. Workforce shortages, increased labor expenses, and supply disruptions have caused costs to outpace revenue, leading the healthcare industry to look for solutions to help them with these challenges. This should be just the ticket.
EHRs are an essential tool for healthcare providers, allowing them to quickly access and update patient information, but they can also be burdensome, time-consuming to use, and can often be prone to errors. This Microsoft Epic partnership and the integration of OpenAI into Epic’s EHR should provide benefits on numerous fronts: increased productivity and efficiencies, reduced costs, more accurate information and results, increased ease of use, and, of course, the most important of all, this should free up clinicians to focus more on patient care and less on navigating through their EHR. Major wins all the way around. I’m very much looking forward to seeing more news on the integration of gen AI into the healthcare space — there’s much opportunity here.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Image source: Epic | Microsoft
Author Information
Shelly Kramer is a serial entrepreneur with a technology-centric focus. She has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation.
