VERONA, Wisc.—As healthcare organizations rapidly adopt artificial intelligence technologies, electronic health record giant Epic aims to be the foundational layer, embedding AI and automation into clinical, operational and administrative workflows.
At its annual Users Group Meeting in Verona, Wisconsin, this week, Epic unveiled a new suite of AI tools, new capabilities for clinical decision-making at the point of care and workflow automation, all building on initiatives announced at the 2025 UGM and also at industry conferences throughout the past year.
More than 8,400 people attended Epic's conference in-person at the company's headquarters, with an estimated 70,000 people attending the event virtually and in-person, an Epic spokesperson said.
Epic now commands 43.7% of the acute-care EHR market, giving the company significant leverage as it expands its AI capabilities. The company claims that its software is installed in more than 3,700 hospitals, and more than 325 million patients now have medical records in Epic.
CEO Judy Faulkner, dressed as a cowgirl as part of the company's county fair-themed event, said the company delivered on the promises made at its UGM event last year. Tracking 167 projects, 84 of those projects were done on time, seven were completed or will be completed soon and 76 projects are in progress and on track, she said. "The conclusion is that what you hear here is very likely to happen," she told the audience.
Faulkner framed the three-hour executive address on Tuesday morning around the company's development of Ergo, what she described as "healthcare intelligence," a concept she teased at last year's UGM. Ergo is an AI system that combines the strengths that humans bring to the table (judgment, empathy and intuition) with AI's ability to find patterns across huge datasets in the EHR and to iterate quickly. "Plus, [AI] is always available, and it never gets tired," Faulkner said.
Ergo is built on a data foundation of the EHR, the patient's MyChart, Epic's healthcare network and Cosmos, the company's clinical research platform.
Epic is weaving generative AI and automation directly into its EHR, and the company is making a big push to highlight how its AI capabilities and copilot tools—Art, its clinical AI copilot, Emmie, its patient-facing AI assistant and Penny, a copilot for revenue cycle—can all work together to function as an enterprise AI system for healthcare.
On the outpatient side, Faulkner said Ergo Visit is now live at Ochsner Health, as well as five physicians in Epic's Garden Plot collaborative. As part of the Ergo Visit, as Faulkner explained, prior to the patient visit, Art, Epic's AI assistant for clinicians, can provide a summary of the patient's record to get clinicians up to speed on the most clinically relevant points.
"Emmie talks with the patient in MyChart ahead of the visit, and then together Art and Emmie work to create a list of possible topics for the physician. Art creates summaries, key information for the healthcare team, and these summaries are in use now at over 300 healthcare organizations, and they get good feedback. Users tell us it summarizes information that helps them catch what might otherwise have been missed, especially things that come in through Care Everywhere that are coming from another healthcare organization, and they're amazingly quick," she told the audience.
According to Epic, 68% of users surveyed across the Epic community said visit summaries that include notes from Care Everywhere highlighted new patient information they would not have otherwise found.
Chart with Art, the company's AI-native charting tool, listens to the conversation between the patient and clinician, drafts the note and tees up other documentation for the clinician to review.
"Our goal was to redesign the office visit as we would build it if we were starting from scratch, with all of the technology we have available today," said Garrett Adams, senior vice president of R&D at Epic.
Epic also is adding a feature that enables clinicians to interact with Art using their voice. Earlier this year, the company developed Ask Emmie, a conversational AI assistant in MyChart that answers patients’ health questions within the context of their medical record. Sutter Health, which collaborated with Epic to test and refine Ask Emmie, was the first to go live with that feature in March.
Other organizations have since rolled out Ask Emmie. Ochsner Health reported that it saved more than 1,000 hours for call center staff over 10 months. Community Health Network, which went live with the feature in July, reported 73% fewer billing-related InBasket messages.
Epic also reports growing adoption of its AI tools. In March, the company said more than 85% of Epic’s customers now use Epic AI. Epic's AI-powered clinician and nurse summaries are in use at more than 300 health systems. In March, Houston Methodist became the first organization to use Chart with Art for bedside nursing workflows. That capability is now live at 11 health systems, the company said.
Chart with Art is now live in more than 70 unique specialties and multiple clinical roles, the company said.
A big headline during Epic's presentation was the rollout of its Agent Factory, which it previewed at the HIMSS26 conference in the spring.
Agent Factory is Epic's platform for building, running and monitoring AI agents that can reason and act across workflows. "You can take it, shape it, make it," Faulkner said. "You can take one of our currently available 120 AI features out-of-the-box. You can shape it for your organization, like equipping Emmie with a visitor guide so it can help patients find the best places to park. That's shaping it, or you can make an agent yourself and share it with others."
Through Agent Factory, healthcare organizations can build something new without writing code. Early adopters are using Agent Factory today, according to the company, and it will be widely available in 2027. ECU Health built an AI agent to summarize transfer center requests, which improved handoffs and saved an estimated 20 hours a week, according to Epic.
As the healthcare AI market has become increasingly competitive with startups and health tech vendors pitching third-party tools, Epic is placing a big bet on its ability to embed tools deeply into EHR workflows.
Speaking on stage, Seth Howard, vice president of R&D, stressed that the new tools and capabilities highlighted on Tuesday were not separate features. "Under the hood, it's a single integrated system: Art, Emmie, Penny, Agent Factory, Curiosity, the healthcare network, together with you as one team working to make healthcare better for everyone."
Epic is also leveraging its clinical research database, Cosmos, to build a generative AI model, called Curiosity, that uses real-world patient data to forecast outcomes such as hospital readmission and stroke risk. Cosmos combines clinical data from a community of Epic Systems health systems representing over 320 million patients and 23 billion medical encounters, Faulkner said.
Twenty healthcare organizations are working to validate Curiosity, Faulkner noted, and the predictive tool will be available to any organization contributing to Cosmos. Epic plans to release Curiosity as an integrated component of its EHR software in March 2027, Howard noted.
"Curiosity learns from the patient charts in Cosmos, so Curiosity can present possible answers for you and for your patient, even when there's no published study to review. We think Curiosity predictions will become extremely important for healthcare organizations as you care for your patients," Faulkner said.
As a generative AI model trained on the Cosmos dataset, Curiosity can answer clinical questions at a population level as well as about a specific patient's health trajectory, executives said.
Researchers at Yale School of Medicine evaluated Epic's Curiosity foundation model to see whether it could predict what happens after patients are discharged from the emergency department with abdominal pain. Unlike traditional models that predict a single outcome, Curiosity generates likely future care trajectories, including whether patients will return to the ED, when they will return and whether they will require hospitalization.
The researchers published a preliminary, non-peer-reviewed article in medRxiv that evaluated Curiosity's ability to predict the timing, sequence, and severity of downstream care after ED discharge for abdominal pain. Based on a a study of 3,000 patients, Curiosity outperformed a conventional machine learning model in predicting hospital admissions after an ED revisit and was more accurate at forecasting entire post-discharge care pathways, researchers wrote.
Epic is leveraging Cosmos to offer clinical decision support tools for clinicians, including a "look-alike" feature that compares a patient's case against similar cases in the Cosmos database. That capability has been used 25,000 times in the last year, Faulkner said.
Epic's feature called Best Care Choices for My Patient is now live at nearly 60 organizations. That tool analyzes de-identified observational data from millions of patients in the Epic Cosmos network to show clinicians how similar patients responded to various treatment options, helping guide evidence-based decisions at the point of care.
Patients are quickly turning to AI tools to supplement their healthcare as every country faces healthcare constraints and access issues, Carl Dvorak, president of Epic International, told the audience on Tuesday. Epic wants to work with health systems and providers to leverage AI safely and responsibly while also keeping up with the pace of innovation, he noted.
"When I think of AI, the thing that comes to mind first is we've got to find a way to move faster, especially given that patients are as broadly adopting this right now. We've got to find a pathway to our AI utopia before patients become frustrated with the health system and frustrated that you can no longer be trusted as their primary source of medical information," Dvorak said.
"We're going to have to figure out who to trust. We have to trust them, and we're going to have to move. So that means for you guys, a call to action here: get engaged and stay involved with regulatory bodies. And equally as important, be leaders internally. Let's be leaders and let's find our path through this, and not find another reason to wait, because if we don't get through it, others will. We've got to find a path through that so that we can keep pace with the future of AI," Dvorak said.
Epic executives also announced advances in interoperability initiatives as well as new products and capabilities in areas outside of the EHR.
On the interoperability front, organizations using Epic exchanged 9 billion records last year. More than 2,150 hospitals and 58,000 clinics using Epic are connected to the federal TEFCA framework for nationwide health data exchange, the company said.
Epic made two major announcements regarding interoperability advances:
Real-time prior authorization checks: Four health systems are now using real-time prior authorization checks embedded in the Epic electronic health record, tackling a major pain point for providers. Epic collaborated with insurers UnitedHealthcare, Network Health and Aetna to set up the electronic workflows to modernize the manual and time-consuming prior auth process. Epic launched real-time insurance reviews directly into EHR workflows using an industry-standard application programming interface (API) called Coverage Requirements Discovery (CRD). Epic is testing the API with 16 additional payers to support wider industry adoption. Read the full story here.
Diagnostic image exchange solution: Using open image exchange standards and its existing interoperability pipelines, Epic expanded its Care Everywhere platform to radiology images. Healthcare providers at Epic-connected health systems can now retrieve and share diagnostic-quality medical images, such as CT scans, X-rays and MRIs, with a single click. Released this month, the capability is now available across the Epic community. Read the full story here.
Here's what else Epic announced this week:
Natively integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite: Epic is building an ERP exclusively for healthcare operations that will collect financial, operational and clinical data in one unified system. The first application to roll out of EpicOps is Teamwork, a clinician and staff scheduling and resource planning module that features real-time, pattern-driven and assignment-aware scheduling capabilities. New EpicOps capabilities are being rolled out gradually. Credentialing and cost accounting modules within the EpicOps ERP suite are expected to roll out in mid-2027. Supply chain and financial functions will roll out at the end of next year, followed by HR and payroll functions, executives said in June.
Clinical trials management system: Epic confirmed it is building a CTMS system saying that customers told the company that current offerings fall short.
Health alerts: A new U.S. outbreak detection and monitoring capability on EpicResearch.org. The capability monitors county- and state-level diagnosis rates across thousands of ICD-10 codes, screening out seasonal patterns like the flu.
New customer support services: Epic introduced new ways the company is helping customers implement the company’s software and use features. Through a new program called Epic Rangers, staff can join a customer’s IT team long-term. Guides are Epic staff who work with customers to work on specific features.
Healthcare executives, including health system leaders and health tech startups, typically pay close attention to Epic's announcements at UGM to track the largest EHR vendor’s tech strategy.
Robby Wallace, vice president of clinical implementation at AI-powered compliance and reimbursement platform Rainfall Health, said Epic’s 2026-27 roadmap signifies "an exciting industry-wide commitment to making each part of the care experience more efficient for all involved."
"As a former practicing clinical nurse and implementation lead at a growing healthcare startup, Epic’s real-time prior authorization announcement is an exciting development, not only for patients avoiding delays in care, but also in lessening a long-standing administrative burden that’s hampered clinical and hospital staff," Wallace told Fierce Healthcare.
Eddie Qureshi, CEO and founder of Rainfall Health, said he is keeping an eye on Epic's Curiosity predictive tool.
"The amount of real-world patient data that it's built on has the potential to transform predictive modeling and outcome forecasting, which will really help hospitals as they are seeing more and more federal payment mandates tied to 30, 60, and 90 day episodes of care. This is incredibly impactful in laying the groundwork for post-surgical care, where readmissions, ED returns, and other post-acute issues increase financial penalties from CMS. The lift in turning this into actionable and real-time insights with clear interventions is going to be made possible with these foundations," Qureshi told Fierce Healthcare.
"In the Administration's push for pay-for-value (ACCESS, TEAM, CJR-X) and innovative AI solutions to lower health spend while maintaining high quality care," he noted.
Michael Dalton, CEO and founder of virtual-first care platform Ovatient, said Epic executives have been transparent about the features and capabilities the company has been working on in the past few years and have shared in detail what work has been delivered and what is coming in the very near future. “Basically, what we saw the last few years was a thousand flowers starting to bloom across the Epic ecosystem and now we're starting to see it all come together in one beautiful bouquet,” Dalton said.
The investments Ovatient has made in Emmie and Art are going to enable the patient, provider and the entire care team to have access to the same information and co-develop a shared agenda for a patient visit, he noted.
“Our team-based model of care needs this as we will now truly be able to empower the most important team member - the patient - to really understand their medical history, to make sure that they understand the best next action, and to advocate for what is best for them or for a loved one. What's even better, is that patient doesn't have to take their personal health information and share it in ChatGPT or Claude. I think this really gets us closer to what we like to call the Digital Health Home and it can be at their trusted local health system,” Dalton said.
Editor's Note: This story has been updated with comments from industry executives and the latest information about products and capabilities that were announced at UGM.