At Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital, opening a patient chart may soon begin with a question, not a click.
The organization is among the first to experiment with Epic’s conversational AI tool, Ask Art. Ask Art functions similarly to consumer AI chatbots like ChatGPT, but draws its answers from a specific patient’s electronic health record rather than the open web. A clinician can type a question about a medication, a lab trend or a clinical history and receive a synthesized response with links back to the underlying source notes.
“We saw this as the future of how we interact with Epic,” Nishit Patel, MD, chief medical informatics officer and AI strategy officer at Tampa General, told Becker’s.
The pilot began with a small group of clinicians on Tampa General’s informatics team who also practice clinically, giving the organization a first look before expanding access. A second wave of about 20 physicians is next, after which Tampa General plans to scale the tool more broadly across the health system. The staged approach is deliberate. Dr. Patel said clinicians who have a bad first experience with a new tool are difficult to win back.
“Clinicians will generally try a tool once or twice, and if it doesn’t meet their expectations, it’s very hard to get them to try it again no matter how much better it gets,” he said.
So far, the early group’s experience has been positive. Dr. Patel, who still practices as a dermatologist, described using Ask Art on an organ transplant patient with advanced cancer and a life-threatening skin condition. Rather than searching through notes, he could ask directly about relevant drug interactions and disease specifics, while colleagues on other teams queried the same chart for cardiac status and fluid management.
“This tool allows you to go and ask questions just like we’re used to in our own consumer experience with ChatGPT or Gemini, but anchored in that patient’s data,” he said.
He also used it to generate a handoff report for a complex inpatient, a use case his team now plans to highlight as they bring more physicians on.
The concern driving much of the enthusiasm, Dr. Patel said, is the volume of information buried in modern patient records.
“One in five charts is the length of ‘Moby-Dick,'” he said. “How quickly do you think your physician can run through that and get all the key information? That’s not reality. We need to get all of that insight to the clinician’s hands in a way that is efficient and exactly what they want.”
Formal metrics on time savings or clinical impact are not yet available. The tool has been live with a limited user group.
“This is a little different, because it’s early, and so we are learning a lot as we’re using it,” Dr. Patel said.
Feedback is being collected through a built-in rating system and through regular calls between Tampa General and Epic’s development team.
The rollout also passed through Tampa General’s AI governance committee, a body the health system stood up 25 months ago. The committee includes clinicians, ethicists and legal staff, and reviews every AI tool the hospital deploys for performance, safety and ethical considerations.
“People think of speed and safety as opposing statements, like you can’t be both fast and safe,” Dr. Patel said. “But you can, with the right processes in place.”
Tampa General currently has about 15,000 team members using other Epic generative AI tools that have cleared the same process.
For Epic, Tampa General’s launch is the first step in a broader rollout. Garrett Adams, the company’s senior vice president of research and development, said additional health systems are slated to go live in the coming weeks, with pace determined by how the tool performs and how quickly customer demand builds.
“Even if I want to start out slow,” Mr. Adams told Becker’s, “the momentum from the community asking for it will outweigh any conservatism I have.”
The near-term roadmap, Mr. Adams said, includes the ability to take actions within the EHR, not just surface information, as well as proactive guidance that adapts based on which screen a clinician is viewing and how a given department operates. The goal, he said, is for Ask Art to function less like a search tool and more like a collaborator.
“This isn’t going to be a passive scribe,” Mr. Adams said, “but more like an active digital colleague.”
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