By MICHAEL MILLENSON
A Rock Health write-up of this year’s Epic Users Group Meeting captured the artificial intelligence vibe with a play on the names of three new AI chatbots rolled out by the country’s dominant electronic health record firm. “Epic Goes APE (Art, Penny and Emmie),” read the headline, using the first letters of the names of chatbots designed for, respectively, clinicians, revenue cycle managers and patients.
Emmie does positive things for patients – more on that in moment – but at its core the chatbot is a B2B play, designed to address the needs of the hospitals, medical groups and others whose fees have built the privately held EHR firm into an estimated $5 billion business.
Emmie is not an agent of patient autonomy. Its purpose is to help Epic customers (health systems and physician practices) provide more and better services to their customer, the patient, as long as that patient remains a customer.
That context is important. Yes, in a way it’s #PatientsUseAI, but that use is analogous to the AI algorithms deployed by Netflix. While you may marvel at their power of personalization, they’re never going to tell you that the best movie for your particular interest is harbored over at Hulu and, by the way, even if you’re watching tons of programs with medical themes, you’re still a couch potato.
I wasn’t present at the gathering at Epic’s Verona, Wisconsin headquarters, but news accounts and LinkedIn postings suggest that, unsurprisingly for this type of meeting, there was more drama than details. Much of what was unveiled and hinted at – the company said it’s working on more than 200 AI applications – will be rolled out over the course of 2026 and beyond.
Here’s Epic’s introduction of Emmie and Art from its LinkedIn account:
Informed by their chart and connected devices, Emmie is designed to support patients between visits. Whether it’s explaining test results in easy-to-understand terms, suggesting next steps, or guiding patients through open-ended conversations about their health, Emmie makes it easier for patients to stay on top of their health and walk into the exam room with a clear picture.
On the clinician side, Art is gathering data from Emmie to get the doctor the information they need before the visit even begins. Art is designed to reduce administrative burden, help doctors better understand their patients, and offer context-informed insights. This can take the form of generating pre-visit summaries, taking real-time notes, and even taking actions like placing orders or verifying prior authorization requirements.
That Rock Health analysis suggested that the real significance “may be less the function and more the channel,” since consumers are far more willing to share health data with their provider – in this case through Epic’s MyChart – than with a tech company (such as an AI vendor). “By capturing patient questions, decisions, and symptom-checking,” Rock Health noted, “Epic gains visibility into information consumers might hesitate to share with a generalist tech company. The EHR giant has already signaled that this data will feed back into [its] tools.”
Or as Epic did not say, “We empower our customers. We empower patients. We empower ourselves.” Good intentions alone do not get your product into use by more than half of all acute-care hospital beds in America, according to a KLAS estimate of market share.
At Healthcare IT Today, veteran tech journalist John Lynn sniffed out the actual schedule for all Emmie’s promised pro-patient wonders. According to Lynn (presumably from Epic itself),
- proactive outreach and images is coming in March, 2026
- active engagement in November, 2026
- future screenings arrive sometime in 2026 (no month given).
Bill payment, scheduling abilities using SMS (texting) and a voice agent are all “coming in the future.”
As I commented on the Epic LinkedIn post, “How about patient-reported outcome measures [e.g. Proteus Consortium’s], whether from an app linked to Epic (i.e., like Twistle by Health Catalyst or others) or the patient’s own wearables?” I tagged Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, who played a prominent role at the meeting, but got no reply. (To be fair, maybe he took some vacation time after an intense few weeks.)
In a recent STAT First Opinion that took up the topic of autonomy, I asserted that true informed consent means physicians should be obligated to inform patients what Epic’s Cosmos system says about the likely outcomes of treatment for individuals with their clinical profile. Those predictions come from a database drawing on a mind-boggling 15.7 billion patient encounters. But patients should be able to access that information about different hospitals’ results on their own.
At the Users Group Meeting, Epic announced a further refinement of Cosmos, with founder and chief executive officer Judy Faulkner proudly announcing that the company will be able to “predict the future” for patients. (For a deep dive into Cosmos, I recommend the posts of veteran medical informatics expert Mark Braustein.)
Faulkner did what any smart businessperson would do. She spoke about how her company’s product would enable an important segment of customers, clinicians and health systems, to provide better care. What those customers actually do (or don’t do) for their “customer,” the patient, with the Epic software? Evidently “Not my job.”
Michael L. Millenson is president of Health Quality Advisors & a regular THCB Contributor. This first appeared in the “Patients use AI” Substack
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