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How AI Will Change Physician Functionality in Epic
South Central and its consortium partners, remain committed to improving the patient experience. As health care advances, physicians continually refine how they evaluate, diagnose and treat. With Epic’s advanced AI capabilities, physicians can work more efficiently, dedicating more time and attention to what matters most, delivering compassionate, comprehensive care to every patient.
“These tools will enable physicians to focus on the patient interaction and less on the tedious clerical and follow-up tasks that are necessary for patient care,” Chief Medical Officer Mark Horne, MD, said.
Epic offers the following AI features that will soon be utilized across our consortium:
Smart Order & Information Queuing:
To provide informed care, physicians need to familiarize themselves with each patient’s specific medical history, medical conditions and current medical concerns. Familiarizing themselves with a patient’s chart can be very time-consuming, especially in complex cases.
Epic uses AI to generate patient chart summaries, greatly expediting the process. In the near future, physicians will also be able to automatically queue relevant orders.
Automated Documentation & Charting:
Charting is an important component of every patient interaction, but it can often be time-consuming.
The Epic feature “Art” helps mitigate this issue. This feature listens to patient-provider conversations to draft progress notes and clinical summaries, adding actions to a review cart for physician sign-off, saving significant time.
“This ambient listening is not yet available for full release, but it is clearly down the road in development, and we look forward to its release in the not-so-distant future,” Dr. Horne said.
Administrative Burden Reduction:
Physicians are not exempt from administrative tasks. Behind the scenes, physicians are constantly ordering scans, tests and other services, all of which require accurate codes. This process can be tedious. Physicians also often need to advocate for their patients by working alongside the patient’s insurance companies.
Epic AI tools help draft and manage prior authorization requests, reducing physician and staff effort and helping the patient receive the treatment they need.
The feature “Penny” assists with medical coding, generating denial appeal letters and streamlining claims processing, tackling tedious back-office tasks. This streamlines and speeds up the process.
Enhanced Patient Engagement:
Physicians spend a great deal of time ensuring that their patients understand their care plans, but not every question gets answered during a face-to-face visit.
The feature “Emmie” works within MyChart to answer patient questions, schedule appointments, provide disease info and suggest relevant screenings, freeing physician time from routine messages and notifying them when a question warrants their manual response.
“It will be able to automatically generate answers to simple questions based on the intricacies of each individual patient,” Dr. Horne said. “It will also draft responses to patient queries for physicians to review, which will speed up the process.”
Streamlined Workflows:
Epic AI makes closing out an appointment easier than ever for physicians by consolidating tasks and prompting them to approve.
The “Shopping Cart” review feature compiles and notes from a visit and gathers them into a review cart, allowing physicians to quickly verify and sign-off on everything at the end.
Clinical Decision Support & Insights:
“Cosmos” database is perhaps the most exciting Epic AI capability, because it has the potential to create many positive patient outcomes.
“Cosmos” is Epic’s vast de-identified data to show predicted outcomes for similar patients, offering powerful diagnostic insights at the point of care.
“If a patient has an unusual sort of symptoms, we can ask AI to use ‘Cosmos’ to determine, based on a vast amount of real patient data, when others have these types of symptoms, what were they diagnosed with,” Dr. Horne said. “It can be used to direct the physician to a diagnosis they may not have otherwise considered.”
Physicians can expect to spend less time clicking and typing and more time focusing on the patient, with AI acting as a digital colleague that prepares information, handles paperwork and provides insights, directly combating clinician burnout.
SCRMC and its partners are excited to officially launch Epic on Jan. 31, 2026. This organization-wide improvement enhances how we deliver care and marks the beginning of a new era across the consortium.
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