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Epic UGM Recap | Clarium’s AI Supply Chain
August 22, 2024
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Together with
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“Laugh to learn. Entertain to educate.”
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Epic CEO Judy Faulkner at #UGM2024
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Epic’s “Storytime” User Group Meeting is officially a wrap, and the number of updates shared at the event would be hard pressed to keep with the theme and fit in a children’s book.
CEO Judy Faulkner donned the podium dressed as Mother Goose to tell the tale of Epic’s recent advances, AI roadmap, and even a “25-to-50-year” company plan.
It wouldn’t be a 2024 UGM without AI hogging the spotlight, and the EHR behemoth certainly delivered on that front. Highlights included:
- Epic currently has two killer use cases for AI. Medical scribes (186 user orgs), and draft responses to portal messages (150 user orgs). Those counts reflect the number of “user” orgs, but it wasn’t clear how many have done system-wide deployments.
- Epic is actively working on over 100 new GenAI solutions, ranging from auto-populating forms and discharge papers to delivering evidence-based insights at the point of care.
- Epic Cosmos’ Look-Alikes AI tool is now live at 65 sites, helping identify rare diseases by cross-referencing symptoms in its database of over 226M patient records and connecting physicians with kindred cases.
The teasers stole the show, and physicians (or payors!) have plenty to look forward to if Epic can deliver.
- An upcoming Best Care Choices for My Patient tool will provide treatment recommendations at the point of care based on what worked / didn’t work for similar patients. NYU Langone and Parkview Health are already test-driving the solution.
- A new Payor Platform is now available to all health system customers, with AI features to streamline prior auths, manage claims denials, and connect provider directories. Epic is also exploring how to cut out clearinghouse middlemen by sending PA documentation directly to payors.
- By the end of next year, MyChart’s GenAI will be able to pull in test results, medications, and other patient details to better customize draft messages and help automatically queue up orders for labs and prescriptions.
- A Teamwork staff scheduling application is sparse on details but on the way “soon.”
The Takeaway
Given how much time clinicians spend in the EHR and the treasure trove of data it holds, it isn’t a surprise that Epic has become an integral component of its health systems’ AI strategy. That said, user group meetings are meant to excite user groups, and we’ll know soon enough how many of these announcements were just Storytime.
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K Health’s First-of-its-Kind AI Knowledge Agent
K Health’s AI Knowledge Agent is a first-of-its-kind GenAI system purpose-built for the clinical setting, with a familiar feel hiding some major innovation under the hood. Discover how the AI Knowledge Agent is bringing new levels of personalization to answering patient medical questions and changing what it means to have a “digital front door” in the process.
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Clear Arch Health Reduces Readmissions at Altru
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RPM Made Easy with a User-Friendly Platform
Seamlessly integrate Withings RPM with your existing EHR system and empower your care team to focus on what matters most – patient care.
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- Clarium Closes $10.5M: Hospital supply chain tech startup Clarium closed $10.5M in a strategic growth round led by General Catalyst. The announcement included the unveiling of Clarium’s Astra OS workflow platform and data ecosystem that uses AI to “reimagine and transform supply chain management.” Astra OS is reportedly being developed in collaboration with several health systems, so it seems like a solid testament that KP Ventures and Yale New Haven Health participated in the round.
- Health System Lightning Round: The Q2 health system numbers have arrived. BayCare recorded an impressive 21% margin and an 11% operating margin on the back of soaring patient volumes and cost reductions. Cleveland Clinic saw a slimmer 1.2% operating margin after pharmaceutical expenses spiked 16%, but it’s still on track to see $15B+ revenue in 2024. Kaiser Permanente’s 3.3% operating margin was squarely in the middle of the pack, but it continues to see stellar investment performance and notched a $4.6B revenue bump from its Geisinger acquisition.
- UHG Acquisition Spree: As for UnitedHealth Group’s second quarter, the quarterly filing included updates to an already well-established fact: the healthcare juggernaut loves secretly scooping up physicians. United entered into $2B of new acquisition agreements during Q2, and not a single one had been publicly disclosed. On top of that, United completed $10B of pending acquisitions in July alone, while naturally sharing zero information on the number of transactions or the size of the targets.
- K Health AI Benchmark Results: K Health took the stage at the Association for Computational Linguistics Conference to share results from an AI Medical QA Benchmark Study demonstrating that its trained LLM Knowledge Agent is up to 36% more comprehensive and 41% less hallucination-prone than competing models (inc. GPT-4, Gemini / Bard, Mistral 7B). The LLMs were compared using K’s K-QA dataset of 1,212 real-world patient questions spanning ~100 different medical conditions, with the results evaluated by a team of 12 in-house MDs who adjudicated the responses using sources like UptoDate and PubMed.
- BayCare Teams Up With Cadence: FL-based BayCare is teaming up with chronic condition management startup Cadence to implement a remote monitoring program for seniors with hypertension, congestive heart failure and type 2 diabetes. The program shares real-time vitals such as weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and glucose levels with BayCare clinicians and Cadence’s 24/7 care team, enabling proactive medication optimization, lifestyle guidance, and intervention if any metrics are out of range.
- Pandemic Visit Dropoff: Although telehealth partially offset the drop in primary care visits at the start of the pandemic, a new study in Annals of Family Medicine showed that visit declines varied widely across demographics. After crunching the numbers for 1.7M patients across 408 practices (March 2019 – 2021), researchers observed a 7% decrease in total visits, a 17% decrease in in-person visits, and a telehealth conversion ratio of 10%. Pediatric patients saw the largest dropoff in total visit volume (-24%), followed by Asian patients (-11%) and those with multiple comorbidities (-9%).
- Levels Lands $10M: Levels landed an additional $10M through a Series A extension to combine continuous glucose monitors with app-based insights to show its users how lifestyle choices impact their metabolic health. The direct-to-consumer CGM space has been heating up, with Levels’ latest funding following close behind FDA-clearances for consumer-grade devices from major players like Dexcom (Stelo CGM) and Abbott (Lingo CGM).
- Nuvance Expands Neuroglee to Primary Care: NY-based Nuvance Health is expanding access to Neuroglee Connect – a gamified brain training app with physician supervision – from its neurology department to primary care. The move is notable given the growing role of PCPs in filling the treatment gap left by a nationwide shortage of neurologists, coincidentally landing on the same week as a new Lancet study finding that 45% of dementia cases could be delayed or reduced through earlier lifestyle interventions.
- SVB Mid-Year Investment Report: SVB’s mid-year healthcare investment report echoed the sentiment of other recent updates: digital health funding is a tale of two cities. While Series A digital health startups collected $1.7B across 109 rounds in the first half – with median valuations swelling 16% to $44 million – Series B and C companies closed much smaller sums in extension rounds designed to hold them over until next year when they might be able to raise at higher valuations. Over 28% of H1 healthcare investments were down or flat rounds, the highest total since 2019.
- Metabolic Syndrome Body Scan: A Mayo Clinic team used Select Research’s white-light 3D-BV body scanner – normally used for fitting clothes – to scan 1.3k people for signs of metabolic syndrome. The scanner detected metabolic syndrome more accurately than traditional metrics like BMI and waist-to-hip ratio, suggesting that 3D-BV scans could someday find a home in healthcare. The images alone are worth checking out.
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The State of Payor Enrollment and Credentialing
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Carle Health Chooses Nabla for Workflow Focus
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A First Principles Approach to Responsible AI
Playback Health has over 15 years of experience breaking down complicated technology problems into basic elements then reassembling new solutions from the ground up, and just published a short-and-sweet guide to help others take a “first principles approach” to responsible AI.
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