Epic Systems, America’s largest electronic health records company, maintains medical information for 180 million U.S. patients (56% of the population) it has a portfolio of 20 proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms designed to identify different illnesses and predict the length of hospital stays.
One of the most important Epic algorithms is for predicting sepsis, the leading cause of death in hospitals. Sepsis occurs when the human body overreacts to an infection and sends chemicals into the bloodstream that can cause tissue damage and organ failure. Early detection can be life-saving, but sepsis is hard to detect early on.
Epic claims that the predictions made by its Epic Sepsis Model (ESM) are 76 percent to 83 percent accurate, but there have been no credible independent tests of any of its algorithms — until now.
A Michigan lead study was able to access and test Epic’s proprietary AI-algorithm and found the company’s claims of their AI’s prediction rate to be over-stated.
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