What will be showcased this year at Epic's booth (#3832) at HIMSS25 in Las Vegas? If years past are any indication, there will be no shortage of creatively whimsical sculptures, cozy sofas and meeting nooks, and a steady stream of foot traffic from curious conference-goers.

There will also be lots of discussion about (you guessed it!) artificial intelligence and the myriad ways it can help healthcare professionals do their work more effectively and efficiently. Epic is integrating AI capabilities into more and more of its technologies, and is committed to helping its customers harness it, says Seth Howard, executive vice president for R&D at Epic.

But that's not all the Verona, Wisconsin-based company will be showing off in the HIMSS25 Exhibition Hall. It will also be talking with clients and others about an array of tools aimed at a wide variety of clinical, financial, research and administrative use cases, he says, including technologies aimed at staff scheduling, enterprise resource planning, clinical trials management and more.

We caught up recently with Howard, who offered a sneak peek of what else visitors can expect from the company in Las Vegas next week.

Q. What new technologies will you be showcasing – introducing or previewing – at the show?

A. With ongoing, rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, we're focused on helping the healthcare community harness these new capabilities. 

AI is forming the next generation of integration across our applications – with agents serving as a digital workforce to improve clinician efficiency and patient experiences. For instance, we expect AI agents to help with pre-visit prep by chatting with patients about their needs, identifying missing tasks (such as labs), helping schedule and complete those tasks, and creating an easy-to-read summary.

At each step, our agents will incorporate real-world insights – and because Epic is a single, integrated system, agents will coordinate across clinical, administrative, and patient-facing workflows.

Another example is AI that helps clinicians identify and manage lung cancer by extracting findings and follow-ups from radiologists' reports. At The Christ Hospital, this has helped clinicians detect cancer earlier and initiate more than 50 cancer treatments – and that's just since August!

AI charting continues to accelerate clinicians' documentation tasks. Earlier this year, we published specifications for ambient voice recognition, opening new ways for vendors to integrate with note-writing workflows in Epic.

Our next step is native multimodal capabilities that can process video input, synthesize voice into various documentation, recognize images, analyze genomic data, and more. We aim to provide a comprehensive suite of options so customers can adopt what best meets their needs.

Beyond AI, customers want integrated modules to help them manage operations across clinical, financial, research, and administrative areas. We're building a clinical trials management system to unite trial workflows for patients, clinicians, researchers, and study administrators, and we're developing an enterprise resource planning suite, which we'll release module by module. Teamwork – a staff scheduling system – was just released and will go live this year.

There's more to share, and we hope you'll visit our booth to learn about it! We continue to advance research and provide point-of-care insights with Cosmos. We're expanding collaboration among providers, health plans, life sciences, retail health, device manufacturers, and others through a shared platform. And we keep improving MyChart, now used by over 190 million patients worldwide.

Q. What are the strategic themes you're focused on this year?

A. We continue to focus on our customers' success. What this means to us: happy and healthy patients, informed and thriving clinicians, efficient health system operations, and advances in medicine. At our booth, we'll highlight ways we're helping our customers achieve ongoing improvements in access to care, finances, clinician wellbeing, and adoption of new technologies like AI.

Q. What are some questions you've been hearing recently from clients?

A. As they face staff shortages, revenue uncertainty, and other ongoing challenges, health systems are under a lot of pressure to help patients access the care they need. There's optimism that technology can help tremendously—but when it comes to adopting new capabilities quickly and at scale, folks are looking for guidance. We started a program called "Level Up" in which our staff help customers deploy the latest features. The best part is the cost – it's free!

Many health systems are eager to adopt AI more broadly but worry about the expense. To address this, we introduced a new licensing model that will allow our customers to significantly expand their use of AI at predictable costs.

Our customers also want to deeply understand how well AI is working in their own clinical settings. We're expanding our open-source AI Trust and Assurance Suite, giving health systems more transparency and control over how they're using AI.

Q. What should visitors to the booth be looking for and asking about at the Epic booth?

A. We've brought a slice of Epic's campus and culture to Las Vegas. We want visitors to feel at home, and our booth provides a place to relax, catch up, and learn about what's new. Many of the staff in our booth are software developers and would love to chat about what they're working on and how we can help. 

Q. Any other news you'd like to highlight?

A. Health systems using Epic continue to lead the interoperability evolution. Most of our customers are either already live or have plans to go live on TEFCA, the government-sponsored national interoperability framework. 

We continue to expand secure healthcare data exchange while ensuring patient privacy protections and expectations are upheld. For example, our customers support individual access to their health data using the TEFCA framework. This helps patients locate their records while ensuring the right person is accessing their data. We're excited to see the first IAS application go live. We've also released USCDI version 3, which is available to developers for free on open.epic alongside over 750 other APIs and interfaces available at no cost to developers.

Epic will be in Booth 3832 at HIMSS25.