Microsoft and Epic Systems announced that they will introduce OpenAI’s GPT-4 artificial intelligence language model into the healthcare field to help medical staff respond to patient information and analyze medical records.
Epic Systems is one of the largest medical software companies in the United States, and its electronic health record (EHR) software (such as MyChart) is used in more than 29% of acute care hospitals in the United States, and the electronic records of more than 305 million patients worldwide are kept in Epic. Still, Epic’s past history of using predictive algorithms for healthcare has drawn some criticism.
It is understood that GPT-4 can help doctors and medical staff automatically draft responses to patient information. “Integrating generative AI into some of our daily workflows will increase the productivity of many of our providers, allowing them to focus on the clinical duties that really require their attention,” said Chero Goswami, chief information officer at UW Health in Wisconsin.
GPT-4 also brings natural language query and “data analytics” capabilities to Epic’s data exploration tool, SlicerDicer, enabling healthcare organizations to search through vast amounts of patient data to spot new trends. According to Microsoft, this will help “clinicians explore data in a conversational and intuitive way.”
Still, the Microsoft-Epic collaboration has drawn the attention of big language model researchers, in part because of GPT-4’s ability to fabricate information that doesn’t exist. Natural language generation (NLG) has been studied in healthcare for years, according to the industry. Among them, the most important point is to provide information that is not misleading.
