Epic’s AI Power Play Tightens Grip on Lucrative US EHR Market

Epic Systems deploys next-gen AI arsenal to dominate America's electronic health records landscape—leaving competitors scrambling.

Strategic Expansion

The Wisconsin-based giant rolls out predictive analytics and automated charting tools that lock in hospital networks. No acquisition costs disclosed—because why bother when you own 40% of the market?

Wall Street's Prescription

Analysts nod approvingly at the vertical integration play. Another masterclass in leveraging legacy infrastructure into perpetual revenue streams—healthcare's version of too big to fail.

Legacy systems meet machine learning. Patients get marginally better UX. Shareholders get the real treatment.

Epic’s Emmie AI assistant will guide patients in MyChart portal

Epic is adding a built-in helper for patients as well. The always-on Emmie assistant will answer questions about lab results, propose appointment times and suggest screenings that patients can discuss with their doctor.

Over a three-hour program, Faulkner and other executives also introduced two more assistants, Art and Penny, and walked through features planned for the next year and beyond.

Art is aimed at clinicians and is designed to act as an active AI colleague, the company said. It will anticipate information a doctor might need, surface trends such as blood pressure over time, update a patient’s family history and place orders. Art will also draft clinical notes, a closely watched capability ahead of the event.

So-called AI scribes, automated documentation tools, capture visit notes in real time as clinicians conduct and record encounters, provided the patient agrees. Interest in scribes has grown as healthcare leaders try to reduce burnout and administrative work. The space has drawn sizable venture backing, with firms like Abridge and Ambience Healthcare securing hundreds of millions.

Epic leverages long-term Microsoft partnership with AI focus

Epic says it is co-developing the AI charting capability alongside Microsoft. The companies have worked closely for roughly two decades, and Microsoft’s DAX Copilot product is already popular within the scribing market.

“We’re proud to be collaborating with Epic to explore how we can bring our core Dragon ambient AI technology to Epic’s new AI Charting capability to further improve care delivery,” Joe Petro, corporate vice president of Microsoft Health & Life Sciences said in a statement.

Penny focuses on the business side of care. Epic said the assistant can generate appeal letters for denied insurance claims and help speed medical coding by serving up suggestions. Faulkner said those two features are already live.

Epic said it is building a set of proprietary foundation models, called Cosmos AI, based on this data, and launched the Cosmos AI Lab to help researchers and data scientists learn more. Executives said the models could be used to predict a timeline of potential medical events, such as readmission risk or a future heart attack.

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