Microsoft and Epic Systems, the largest provider of healthcare software in the US, announced that OpenAI’s GPT-4 will be used in healthcare to generate responses from healthcare professionals and to look for trends in people’s medical records.
Epic Systems’ use of predictive algorithms have previously been criticized.
On Monday, Microsoft announced that Epic will use Azure OpenAI Service to develop 2 generative AI models. Epic will use GPT-4 to allow health care professionals to automatically draft responses to patients.
The press release quotes the chief information officer at UW Health in Wisconsin, Chero Goswami saying, “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.”
The health software company will also integrate data analysis and natural language queries in SlicerDicer, its data exploration tool that enables searching for trends across a large number of patient records. Microsoft said that it will help “clinical leaders explore data in a conversational and intuitive way.”
The partnership raises not only privacy concerns about how medical records are scanned, but also because GPT-4 can make up information. The announcement doesn’t say whether people will be able to opt-in to having their information used in this way or whether it will work on an opt-out basis.
“The urgent and critical challenges facing healthcare systems and their providers demand a comprehensive approach combining Azure OpenAI Service with Epic’s industry-leading technology,” said Eric Boyd, corporate vice president, AI Platform, Microsoft.
“Our expanded partnership builds on a long history of collaboration between Microsoft, Nuance and Epic, including our work to help healthcare organizations migrate their Epic environments to Azure. Together we can help providers deliver significant clinical and business outcomes leveraging the power of the Microsoft Cloud and Epic.”
