Epic President and CEO Judy Faulkner used her Aug. 18 UGM executive address to unveil a wave of Cosmos-powered AI tools, new smaller-organization product tiers, rural health expansions and a cybersecurity update disclosing the company’s use of Anthropic’s most restricted AI model, all framed around what she called “Ergo,” Epic’s new healthcare intelligence platform.
On day two of Epic’s 47th annual Users Group Meeting (UGM), Aug. 18 in Verona, Wis., Ms. Faulkner delivered her executive address dressed as a cowgirl, with this year’s county fair theme marked by an appearance from Scotty, a full-grown miniature Highland bull.
Here are 12 takeaways from her speech:
1. Epic says it delivered on last year’s promises: Ms. Faulkner said Epic tracked 167 projects mentioned at last year’s UGM: 84 were completed on time, seven were completed or will be completed soon and retrofitted into the release originally promised, and 76 are in progress and on track. “What you hear here is very likely to happen,” she said.
2. “Ergo,” Epic’s healthcare intelligence concept, has arrived: First introduced last year as a concept, Ms. Faulkner said it is “here” this year. She described it as a combination of human strengths (experience, judgment, empathy and intuition) and generative AI’s strengths (pattern recognition across large data sets and constant availability), built on a data foundation of the EHR, MyChart, the broader healthcare network and Cosmos, Epic’s clinical research database. Cosmos now holds data from 320 million deduplicated, de-identified patients across 23 billion encounters, according to Ms. Faulkner.
3. AI charting and the “Ergo visit” are already live: Chart with Art, Epic’s native AI charting tool, is in use by doctors, nurses and staff and generates visit notes automatically. Ms. Faulkner described the “Ergo visit” workflow: Art pulls relevant information from the chart ahead of time, Emmie (the patient-facing AI) talks with patients in MyChart before the visit, and the two combine to generate a topic list for the physician. Art-generated summaries are now in use at more than 300 healthcare organizations.
4. Cosmos is powering new clinical decision tools: A “lookalikes” feature, which checks whether a patient’s case is unusual by comparing it against similar cases across Cosmos, has been used 25,000 times in the past year. Best Care Choices for My Patient, released last year, is now used by more than 60 organizations. Ms. Faulkner shared an example from David Shaw, MD, of Premier Health, who used the tool to show a medication-resistant hypertensive patient real-world outcome data from a large number of similar patients, an approach Dr. Shaw said succeeded where multiple prior conversations had not.
5. A new predictive tool called Curiosity is coming: Curiosity uses Cosmos data to generate predictions, such as projected length of stay, ED return risk, stroke risk over the next two years, or rare complications tied to rare diseases. Unlike literature-based AI tools, Ms. Faulkner said Curiosity learns directly from patient charts in Cosmos, so it can offer answers even without a published study to draw on. Twenty customers have worked to validate it so far, and it will be available to any organization contributing to Cosmos.
6. Epic is building smaller product tiers to reach more organizations: Alongside the full Epic and mid-sized Sonnet systems, Epic introduced Orchard (for small organizations, each with its own instance on a shared foundation), Garden Plot (a shared instance for organizations in the same specialty, such as a group of orthopedics practices) and Flower Pot (the smallest tier, currently with one customer). Garden Plot is also being extended to inpatient settings for small hospitals without a Community Connect option.
7. Rural health remains a major focus: Ms. Faulkner cited a state with 20 counties that currently have no healthcare services. Additional rural milestones from the past year were shared during the address: Avera Health brought 36 hospitals and 310 clinics live in a single day across five states, Ascension Sanford continued extending Epic to independent rural groups, and the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador went live provincewide. New critical access hospital Community Connect sites collected more than 100% of their historical baseline charges in year one, with payments up 9%. Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services announced it will adopt Epic as its statewide platform.
8. Epic disclosed its use of Anthropic’s most restricted AI model for cybersecurity: During a portion of the address focused on security, Epic’s hosting lead said that in February, Anthropic’s Claude Code became capable of reasoning about large codebases and finding long-hidden security flaws, a capability described as cutting both ways for defenders and attackers. In April, Anthropic announced a program called Glasswing along with a restricted-access model called Mythos, and Epic disclosed it has been a participant in Glasswing and a heavy user of Mythos. Epic said it used these models to search its own several-hundred-million-line codebase for vulnerabilities its own developers had missed, and told customers to expect more urgent security patches going forward, saying the old 30-day patching standard “is no longer good enough.”
9. Three major new platforms are in development: Epic Ops, Agent Factory and CTMS: Epic Ops is Epic’s ERP product, built to function as one system with EpicCare rather than a bolted-on integration; Ms. Faulkner said organizations satisfied with their current ERP can keep it. Agent Factory is a new AI agent-building platform offering 120 out-of-the-box AI features that organizations can use as-is, customize, or build entirely new agents from, including one example of an organization building an agent to automate chart review after a measles outbreak. Epic also confirmed it is building a Clinical Trials Management System (CTMS) after years of declining to do so, saying customers had told the company existing third-party systems fell short.
10. MyChart is now the top source of organ donor registrations in the U.S.: Following a partnership with Donate Life America launched last year, MyChart became the country’s number one channel for organ donor registrations, with more than 300,000 new registrations total and 42,000 in April alone, nearly five times the next-largest channel. Ms. Faulkner cited a statistic that 16 people die daily in the U.S. waiting for a transplant.
11. Epic is expanding its customer support model with a new “Ongoing Services” arm: OS will sit alongside Epic’s existing Technical Services and Implementation Services teams. It includes Level Up, an existing offering of roughly 20 ways Epic can help customers turn on features, and a new offering called Guides, which gives organizations personalized, one-on-one help implementing a specific feature from their executive packet, at no extra charge. Epic is also launching Epic Rangers, a new program that embeds Epic-hired, Epic-trained staff directly and long-term into a customer’s own IT team, distinct from the existing Boost program, which places staff on time-limited projects. Ms. Faulkner said Epic received 340,000 job applicants this past year and could not hire all the qualified candidates, and framed Rangers as a way to place more of them with customer organizations.
12. A new AI tool aims to speed up work for customers’ own IT analysts: Analyst Build Assistant is a new AI agent designed to help customer-side analysts implement features faster, using the example of a “post-surgical care companion” tool: rather than analysts manually reviewing Epic’s guidance and their own system’s current configuration, the AI assistant does that research and recommends what to change. Epic said early adopters reported the tool cut hours of work down to minutes, and said future versions will let the AI take actions directly, such as making routine build changes, troubleshooting issues, and testing its own changes, rather than only offering recommendations.
Ms. Faulkner closed the address by tying the day’s announcements back to the Ergo framing: AI drawing on the EHR, MyChart, the broader healthcare network, and Cosmos to help guide care for every patient, before thanking Epic and customer staff involved in running the conference.
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