Epic, Microsoft Partner on Generative AI-Powered Solutions

April 17, 2023

UC San Diego Health, Wisconsin-based UW Health, and Stanford Health Care among the first organizations starting to deploy enhancements to automatically draft message responses

David Raths

During a Feb. 17 webinar discussion, Sara Murray, M.D., associate professor of medicine in the Division of Hospital Medicine at UCSF Health and associate chief medical information officer, said that the quickest path to implementation of scalable solutions for large language models in healthcare would probably be for a company like Epic to collaborate with a company like Microsoft.

On April 17, Microsoft Corp. and Epic announced they are working together to combine the scale and power of Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Servicewith Epic's EHR software.

The partnership is focused on delivering an array of generative AI-powered solutions integrated with Epic's EHR. One of the initial solutions is already underway, with UC San Diego Health, UW Health in Madison, Wis., and Stanford Health Care among the first organizations starting to deploy enhancements to automatically draft message responses.

"A good use of technology simplifies things related to workforce and workflow," said Chero Goswami, chief information officer at UW Health, in a statement. "Integrating generative AI into some of our daily workflows will increase productivity for many of our providers, allowing them to focus on the clinical duties that truly require their attention."

Another solution will bring natural language queries and interactive data analysis to SlicerDicer, Epic's self-service reporting tool, helping clinical leaders explore data in a conversational and intuitive way.

"Our exploration of OpenAI's GPT-4 has shown the potential to increase the power and accessibility of self-service reporting through SlicerDicer, making it easier for healthcare organizations to identify operational improvements, including ways to reduce costs and to find answers to questions locally and in a broader context," said Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development at Epic, in a statement.

"The urgent and critical challenges facing healthcare systems and their providers demand a comprehensive approach combining Azure OpenAI Service with Epic's industry-leading technology,".

"Our expanded partnership builds on a long history of collaboration between Microsoft, Nuance and Epic, including our work to help healthcare organizations migrate their Epic environments to Azure,” said Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of the AI Platform at Microsoft, in a statement. “Together we can help providers deliver significant clinical and business outcomes leveraging the power of the Microsoft Cloud and Epic."