Microsoft and Epic Systems recently launched OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model into the health care space to help automate replies from medical professionals and identify trends through medical records. This AI language model, also known as a large language model (LLM), is expected to revolutionize the way medical records are examined and used.
Epic Systems is a leading health technology company in the United States and overseas. Their software, called MyChart, is used in over 29 percent of acute hospitals in the US and provides electronic health records (EHR) for over 305 million patients worldwide.
Microsoft and Epic announced in a press release that Azure OpenAI Service will provide access to OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and GPT-4, to simplify certain everyday tasks in the medical field. For example, the model can automatically compose responses to patient inquiries and streamline data exploration to identify trends with SlicerDicer, their data-exploration tool. This efficiency would be a huge help to doctors and other medical professionals, allowing them to focus more on the needs of patients.
Chero Goswami, chief information officer at UW Health in Wisconsin, commented on the matter, “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.”
Microsoft’s partnership with Epic Systems could very well be a major breakthrough for the health care industry. OpenAI’s GPT-4 model was developed using millions of books, documents, and websites to enable composition and translation in text. It can be used with a chatbot like ChatGPT to ask questions about trends and analysis in medical records.
Some have expressed criticism of Epic Systems’ use of predictive algorithms in the past, but it’s clear that Microsoft and Epic are taking steps to find ways to improve the experience for patients and medical professionals. By using GPT-4, a powerful language model, they may be able to provide new insights into trends in medical records and offer more efficiency to the medical system.
