Epic has given its customers no shortage of AI to turn on, from Art for clinicians to Emmie for patients to Penny for revenue cycle teams. For many health systems, the more telling decisions are about which tools stay off for now.
At Boise, Idaho-based St. Luke’s Health System, that calculus has played out in ambient documentation. The system is piloting Chart with Art while continuing to use Ambience Healthcare’s product where it offers a more mature experience, according to Reid Stephan, senior vice president and CIO.
“Epic is developing rapidly and we are encouraged by its progress, but we do not want to create a step backward for clinicians simply to consolidate platforms,” Mr. Stephan told Becker’s. He said Epic’s tools would need to match the capability and user experience clinicians have today before the system considered making any switch.
Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine reached a similar conclusion. Because Epic arrived later to both, the academic health system relies on Ambience Healthcare for ambient documentation and an internally built application for chart summarization, said Mitchell Schnall, MD, PhD, senior vice president for data and technology solutions.
Penn is also holding off on Emmie. The seven-hospital system plans a complete redesign of its patient engagement technology and wants to determine which tools will best deliver the experience it has in mind, Dr. Schnall said. He described the principle behind both decisions as letting the desired patient and clinician experience drive technology choices, rather than letting a new tool dictate them.
At Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, accuracy has been the deciding factor. Professional billing coding assistance, ambient documentation for physicians and nurses, and a range of AI-generated summaries lead the system’s Epic AI use by volume, per CIO Jeremy Meller. But every feature goes through an evaluation of safety and effectiveness, and one recent tool didn’t clear it.
“We had an example of an inpatient insights capability recently that we felt had too many inaccuracies across diagnosis and patient locations, and produced excessively long narratives,” Mr. Meller said. “We know that the tools will only improve and have the product on a cycle to reevaluate.”
St. Louis-based SSM Health has had a different experience. Jason Muldrow, interim chief digital and information officer, said the organization is seeing meaningful value from Inpatient and Outpatient Insights, alongside the Coding Assistant and Denial Appeal Assistant, which were prioritized for their potential for measurable financial and productivity benefits.
“Epic’s journey on transparency around adoption and pricing has been especially helpful, allowing us to actively monitor utilization and ensure we’re realizing an appropriate return on our AI investments,” Mr. Muldrow said.
The split suggests a hold isn’t necessarily a final verdict. Penn was an early adopter of Epic’s AI-drafted MyChart replies because of the burden the in-basket places on providers, Dr. Schnall said. The tool wasn’t particularly good at first, he added, but Epic’s development and Penn’s own adjustments have made it fairly effective over time.
St. Luke’s builds that expectation into its pilots, “keeping a small group of engaged users in the product continuously so we can evaluate how quickly it is improving and know when it is ready to scale,” Mr. Stephan said.
Other leaders are drawing lines based on the kind of tool rather than how well it performs. Morristown, N.J.-based Atlantic Health is evaluating Art, Emmie and Penny and plans to start with an Emmie pilot, said Sunil Dadlani, executive vice president and chief information and digital transformation officer.
“We are taking a measured approach to tools that make autonomous clinical decisions or engage patients without appropriate human oversight. We also want to avoid overcrowding the portfolio with point solutions that duplicate capabilities or overlap in functionality, creating a technology footprint that is more complex and costly to operate,” Mr. Dadlani said.
Geri Hansen, MSN, RN, vice president of information services applications at Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health, said her organization is pacing adoption around maturity and return on investment.
“In healthcare, trust and reliability matter more than novelty, so we are being thoughtful about solutions that generate clinical content or recommendations without sufficient transparency or governance,” Ms. Hansen said.
For Mr. Stephan, the number of tools a health system switches on says little about whether its AI strategy is working. “It should be measured by whether it solves a meaningful problem, is adopted in the workflow, and produces measurable value,” he said.
