A First Look at Art

Epic's ambient copilot finally shows its face at Microsoft's Ignite conference. Here's what it means.

No health tech product has caused as much debate, consternation, and pearl-clutching in the past year as Epic’s homegrown ambient scribe and AI copilot. From a strategic perspective, it was always obvious that building something natively into the EHR was going to occur. As mentioned in a post in early August:

There’s no rational reason for an EHR to not offer a scribe other than a lack of resources to prioritize (or abject incompetence), but that is not an issue for Epic or other large EHRs

This proved true faster than expected, with press leaking a week later about Epic’s ambitions and then Epic formally announcing it at their User’s Group Meeting later in the month. It would have made ripples either way, but much of the hubbub was due to Epic’s surprise inclusion of Microsoft’s Dragon as a partner of some sort:

Epic announced their ambient functionality, as part of “Art”, Epic’s fuller clinical AI copilot, would be powered by Microsoft Nuance. This is somewhat shocking and makes for some great drama (kingmaking, choosing the goliath over the AI upstarts, etc, etc)

However, since then, we haven’t had much news about the product, and certainly have visibility into what it might look like. That changed this past week as Epic’s Seth Hain and Jackie Gerhart got up onstage at Ignite, Microsoft’s annual conference for developers, IT professionals, and partners. In their ten-minute segment, they detailed Epic’s AI ambitions and showed a light, seemingly prerecorded demo of the clinical copilot.

There’s lots to chew on and parse in the full footage here., but I see three second-order takeaways:

1. The clinical copilot convergence continues to accelerate

2. Epic’s Da Vinci implementation is close to ready

3. Microsoft’s role as a partner is infrastructure, not point solution

Lawyerly Note

I don’t know if this is me waving my hand a la Obi-Wan Kenobi or more of a Gandalf holding back the Balrog moment, but every image and video referenced is already public, as they’ve been published by Microsoft on YouTube and other official channels.