Sean McGunigal on Epic Software’s Role in Advancing the Frontier of AI in Healthcare

In this special episode, HexAI producer Brent Phillips steps behind the microphone to speak with Sean McGunigal, Epic Software’s Software Development Lead for AI Research and Development. Drawing from his own daily experience navigating healthcare information management systems at a hospital, Brent guides a technical conversation on the immense role that enterprise software architectures like Epic play in orchestrating, optimizing, and embedding artificial intelligence directly into clinical workflows across global health systems.

Bridging the gap between frontier software engineering and clinical realities, Sean and Brent discuss Epic's AI development pipeline while anchoring the conversation around Epic’s technical vision where utility, explainability, and trust are paramount. Sean details how Epic’s proprietary ambient AI framework, Chart with Art, seamlessly ingests and parses acoustic conversational data to generate structured documentation, effectively alleviating cognitive burden and clinical friction so medical professionals can prioritize hands-on patient care. Sean emphasizes that to achieve user adoption, Epic's generative summaries are rigidly tied to programmatic data lineage and granular citations, forcing black-box models to prove their clinical outputs.

Aligning with the mission of the University of Pittsburgh’s Health and Explainable AI Research Laboratory and Pitt’s Computational Pathology and AI Center of Excellence (CPACE), the episode highlights Epic’s commitment to helping advance and democratize ethical and responsible AI engineering through open-source frameworks and massive data initiatives. Sean points to Nebula, Epic’s cloud-native platform deployed in Microsoft Azure, which provides a high-throughput, horizontally scalable infrastructure allowing health networks to securely deploy LLMs. Furthermore, he underscores Epic's breakthroughs with Cosmos, their multi-institution de-identified dataset, and Curiosity, Epic's custom-trained Medical Language Model designed to predict patient clinical events using autoregressive, next-token intelligence. By exploring the orchestration of complex agentic AI workflows, runtime evaluation harnesses, and cross-platform communication protocols, Sean closes the episode with a call to action for researchers to get involved and work more closely around safely advancing the frontiers of computational medicine.