Epic unveiled a flurry of new features at its annual Users Group Meeting this week. What do health system executives think?

IT leaders told Beckers at the event that they’re excited about the potential AI capabilities and eagerly anticipate the rollout for many of them. Epic is weaving AI into all aspects of its EHR in a concept founder and CEO Judy Faulkner dubbed “healthcare intelligence.”

“What excites me most is that this isn’t just hype — Epic’s move shows the industry is ready to move from small pilots to true enterprise-level AI. We’re at a real inflection point,” said Crystal Broj, chief digital transformation officer of Charleston, S.C.-based MUSC Health.

“The big challenge now is how health systems manage the growing vendor landscape — many have been building these capabilities for years — and align that with Epic’s roadmap. The key will be merging tools in a way that makes economic sense, while also preparing our workforce to lean into this transformation without being overwhelmed.”

Sha Edathumparampil, chief digital and information officer of Coral Gables-based Baptist Health South Florida, said he’s happy all these new AI tools will be available at the point of care so clinicians don’t have to open up multiple applications. His health system is switching to Epic from Oracle Health in summer 2027.

“Epic is going about it the right way, thinking about adoption, or that last mile, up front,” he said. “Because these capabilities are directly integrated into the platform, you don’t really need as many third-party applications. … They’re making it really easy for people to use.”

He’s also “super, super excited” about the “large medical model” that Epic is developing, trained on 160 billion patient encounters from the company’s Cosmos research platform. “You can only imagine the kind of accuracy you would get with that specific information,” he said. “This is not a model trained on Reddit data. This is from actual physicians and nurses … vitals and test results.” He said Baptist Health South Florida will likely join Cosmos, as have nearly two-thirds of Epic’s healthcare customers, because buying data now “takes too long” and comes with “quality issues.”

With so many AI solutions coming to Epic, Mr. Edathumparampil said (with a smile): “You now need AI to manage the scheduling and planning of AI deployments.”

“It’s a good problem to have,” he said. In healthcare, “we’ve been starved for this level of innovation for years, if not decades. Now it’s coming in, but it’s coming fast, so we just have to be prepared to accept it.”

“I’m also curious, as a technologist and an engineer, how is this all going to run?” he added. “Imagine, hundreds of thousands of providers trying to use this at the same time. What kind of data center infrastructure is going to be needed?”

At UGM, Epic also plugged a coming feature in MyChart that will allow patients to chat with AI about test results, citing research at UC San Diego Health.

“I was one of the research participants and found the functionality easy to use and really helpful, so I’m quite bullish about this overall,” said Christopher Longhurst, MD, chief clinical and innovation officer of UC San Diego Health.

In preliminary research with 120-plus respondents, three out of four said they were “very or extremely likely” to use the chatbot again if it’s made available in MyChart. “People with less education scored the AI helper significantly higher, suggesting this may help bridge the digital divide,” Dr. Longhurst said. Nowadays, many people are copying and pasting test results into ChatGPT for answers, one respondent noted.

“For me, the most exciting thing was the Cosmos AI large medical model,” said Michael Pfeffer, MD, senior vice president and chief information and digital officer of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care. “It’s still in its early stages, but the potential of that is incredible: its predictive capabilities, its abilities to replace more of the traditional models. It’s kind of one model for all.”

If the AI could predict future health events in a person’s life, a clinician could take preventive action, he said. It could also suggest the best diagnoses based on data from hundreds of millions of patients (Epic already estimates patients’ discharges using Cosmos data). He said a new Epic app that automates credentialing also piqued his interest.

“Being able to infuse AI throughout the entire suite of products that Epic provides is really exciting,” Dr. Pfeffer said. “Understanding where to go first, where to go second, is going to be key. And then making sure that the foundations of our system are in really good shape to take advantage of the automations. Like you can’t have an AI agent reschedule your appointment by saying, ‘Call the clinic.’”

Pam Austin, senior vice president and CIO of Johnson City, Tenn.-based Ballad Health, said her main takeaway from the meeting was: “Optimize the things you have, the software you have today, before you add more to it, and then make sure your data is clean so you can take advantage of artificial intelligence.”

She’s also enthusiastic about AI-powered chart abstraction, a feature in MyChart that allows patients to measure their wounds to track healing, and AI revenue cycle management tools to assist with claims follow-up and automate and validate coding.

“Anything that helps summarize or synthesize the information that’s needed for our clinicians before they walk into a visit or shift handoff, and reduces their cognitive burden, shows great promise,” said Anna Schoenbaum, DNP, RN, vice president and chief digital applications officer of Philadelphia-based Penn Medicine.

At UGM, Epic touted its new Launchpad program, which brings healthcare organizations together to quickly roll out the EHR’s latest generative AI features. Penn Medicine recently participated in a cohort with seven other health systems. “A lot of organizations take a lot of time to get started … but you have to have a rapid cycle now,” Dr. Schoenbaum said.

“The introduction of Cosmos AI and the large medical model was the most impactful thing I heard,” said Michael Han, MD, vice president and chief medical information officer of Tacoma, Wash.-based MultiCare Health System. “We don’t participate currently in Cosmos, so it’s something that I’m going to take back to MultiCare and say, ‘I think that this is going to be important for us to really take the next steps toward adopting AI in healthcare.’”

“If you look at the large medical model, if Epic is able to execute on that and put it within the physician workflow, it could be transformational,” he said.

As long as it’s safe, transparent, and valid, Cosmos AI diagnostic and therapeutic suggestions would be “pretty amazing,” Dr. Han said.

“The ability to drive clinical decision support off global patient data … and presenting it at the right time at the right place for the right patient — that’s always been a goal of healthcare informatics,” he said. “The most important thing you learn from medical school is where to look for the right information when a patient comes to see you. And these tools are going to give you the ability, in real time, to query, not just clinical references, but actual patient data. That’s super powerful.”

While he said the technology is the “easy part,” more challenging are the people and processes, such as getting clinicians to trust and adopt the AI, he said.

He said he also found it interesting that Epic will be partnering with Microsoft on its new AI scribe — which is set to launch in early 2026 — since Microsoft’s Dragon (aka DAX) copilot already integrates with the EHR. “There was a lot of noise over the last week or so about Epic developing their own ambient clinical documentation tool, and the fact that this appears to be more of a white labeling of an existing tool, I’m still thinking through the ramifications of that,” he said.

He also wonders if Microsoft ambient AI customers like MultiCare — the health system is currently trialing Abridge and Ambience Healthcare — would transition to Epic’s new AI clinical documentation tool. MultiCare also uses Epic’s pay-as-you-go model for AI, but Dr. Han isn’t sure if the scribe will be part of the AI suite pricing approach the EHR vendor introduced this past year. (An Epic spokesperson said the company had no more information about the AI charting solution.)

“From where I sit, the big takeaway is Epic’s move toward ‘healthcare intelligence,’” said Muhammad Siddiqui, CIO of Richmond, Ind.-based Reid Health. “It feels like a real shift — from just documenting care to using the platform as a smart, real-time tool that brings together data, AI, and workflows. For CIOs, that opens the door to create value right inside the systems we already rely on, instead of patching together point solutions.”

“The AI updates really support that shift,” he added. “What stood out this year is how these tools aren’t just pilots or hype anymore. Features like Synopsis and AI agents are already part of live workflows, which makes a real difference for reducing clinician burden and showing actual impact.”

Dan Exley, interim chief information and innovation officer of San Diego-based Sharp HealthCare, said he’s most eagerly anticipating an analytics feature that will allow health system staffers to query Epic AI for data on specific patient populations, with the chatbot asking follow-up questions to clarify what’s needed through natural language processing.

“That’s a very time-intensive process at this point, involving an analyst coming and talking to a business user,” he said. “The notion that you just give a business user that tool themselves, and the tool will guide them to something that’s actually fairly complex — that was really exciting for me. We’ve never seen anything like that before. So now they just have to make it actually work and do what they showed. But I’m excited and bullish on that.”

Mr. Exley, at his 17th UGM, said he won’t bet against Epic meeting its goals, however bold and ambitious they may be. In this case, that means making the entire EHR agentic-AI-enabled.

“I have rarely seen Epic miss a date, and I can’t remember a time when they broke a promise,” he said. “They keep their word, and they allocate resources to do what they say they’re going to do.”

Some of the AI features aren’t slated until late 2026 or 2027, he noted. But in totality, the technologies could move healthcare away from the “traditional PC/keyboard/mouse paradigm” using multimodal AI, including voice.

“It’s going to take them time to get there, but in true Epic form, when you have a big platform like this, once you’re up, the flywheel starts to pick up speed, and then it’ll be completely unstoppable, in some respects, in a good way,” Mr. Exley said.

“I’m encouraged to see that they’re taking it seriously, that they’re not just doing a one-off, bolt-on AI thing like, ‘Hey, we’re offering a wrapper around ChatGPT and plugging it into the orders console,’ or something like that. They’re really retooling the platform for another era, honestly.”

The post ‘This isn’t just hype’: CIOs react to Epic’s latest AI moves appeared first on Becker’s Hospital Review | Healthcare News & Analysis.