Epic is rolling out a new personalized care data tool, which aims to give doctors crucial patient insights.
That’s according to Phil Lindemann, vice president of data and analytics informatics for the Verona-based electronic health records company. He spoke yesterday during In Business magazine’s Health Care Summit in Madison.
He said patients with hypertension, for example, currently face an overwhelming number of choices for medications but aren’t able to ask their doctor what will work best for them. That’s because providing an informed answer to that question requires too much data for any one clinician to analyze, he said.
That’s where Epic’s Cosmos database comes in, drawing from numerous health systems that use the company’s software platform, he said. Most of the studies done by Epic’s research division already use the database, which the company describes as “a universe of electronic health record data.”
Lindemann said care providers in Indiana will be among the first to try out this decision support function this summer. Epic’s website shows the Cosmos “community” includes more than 1,400 hospitals and 33,000 clinics representing hundreds of millions of patients.
He explained doctors will be able to check their patients’ medical history and compare them with other patients over time to determine the treatment path most likely to succeed.
“Let’s look at patients just like you, and what happened to them over the last three years, five years, what resulted in the lowest incidence of you having a stroke, or a heart attack, and maybe we’ll pick that medication instead,” he said. “So that’s the type of stuff that’s now possible, where essentially every physician can learn from the decisions of every physician before them.”
Epic is also exploring technologies for improving the “load balance” of work done at health care facilities, such as managing direct messaging between patients and doctors, Lindemann said.
“What we did is, after you message your doctor, we’ll actually generate an AI response back to you … so that’s cool, that’s an AI thing,” he said. “But what the researchers found is that it didn’t save doctors any time. Which is like, okay is this a good thing or a bad thing? But they felt the doctors were happier, because they weren’t starting from scratch.”
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