Epic’s overhaul of a flawed algorithm shows why AI oversight is a life-or-death issue

Epic, the nation’s dominant seller of electronic health records, was bracing for a catastrophe.

It was June 2021, and a study about to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association had found that Epic’s artificial intelligence tool to predict sepsis, a deadly complication of infection, was prone to missing cases and flooding clinicians with false alarms. Reporters were clamoring for an explanation.

Epic executives quickly drafted a statement knocking down the findings and rushed to reassure worried customers. It followed up with a blog post, its first in six months, pushing back against the implication that it wasn’t being forthcoming: “Tens of thousands of clinicians have access to the sepsis model and transparency into how it works,” Epic wrote.

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