Epic plans to expand the role of artificial intelligence across its EHR platform and tools in 2026, with a focus on embedding AI directly into clinical, administrative and patient-facing workflows, an Epic spokesperson told Becker’s.
The company said its strategy centers on what it calls “Healthcare Intelligence,” described as joining human creativity with AI woven into everyday workflows across Epic’s fully integrated suite.
As part of that effort, Epic plans to deliver additional native capabilities powered by its AI tools Art, Penny and Emmie, drawing on data captured across the platform.
Art will support conversational search that answers clinician questions using information from across a patient’s chart, including clinical notes, orders, medications, imaging and billing data. The tool will also support AI-assisted charting by documenting care through natural clinician-patient conversation, highlighting key clinical details and preparing relevant orders, with real-time suggestions based on labs, guidelines, prior authorization requirements and more.
Penny will assist with claims follow-up and support autonomous coding, starting with emergency department and radiology visits.
On the patient side, Emmie will provide conversational assistance within the MyChart application to help patients complete pre-visit tasks such as insurance capture, medication review, document signing and more.
These tools represent only a portion of Epic’s planned AI development. The company said more than 150 AI features and additional enhancements are in development for 2026.
In addition to AI-driven capabilities, Epic said it is focused on improving operational efficiency by strengthening connections across what it describes as the Healthcare Network — a broader health data ecosystem that enables collaboration among labs, retail clinics, community providers, payers and medical devices.
Planned improvements include easier connections with national reference laboratories, public health systems and devices such as continuous glucose monitors. Epic is also enhancing payer-provider collaboration through features that automate coverage discovery, prior authorization, claim status checks and documentation review.
Epic will continue to deepen data exchange with federal partners, including the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, and expand support for FHIR-based data services used by provider and patient-facing applications.
Another area of focus for 2026 is EpicOps, Epic’s healthcare-specific enterprise resource planning platform. The company said nurse and staff scheduling will be managed alongside clinical staffing needs in a single view, and supply chain tools will suggest substitutions before a case begins.
AI will play a central role in the platform’s evolution as health systems shift from what Epic describes as assistive AI to collaborative AI that works alongside clinicians and staff to complete multistep processes.
To support safe and effective AI adoption at scale, Epic said it will conduct more healthcare AI research in collaboration with its customers, guide organizations through adoption of high-impact AI use cases through its Launchpad program, and support use of its open-source AI Trust and Assurance Suite for local validation and ongoing performance monitoring.
Epic also plans to focus on out-of-the-box AI features designed to act as a digital workforce for healthcare organizations, and help customers create their own AI agents using its Factory toolkit. In addition, Epic will make Curiosity — a family of healthcare intelligence models trained on medical events from millions of patient records — available to researchers across the Cosmos community. Initial evaluations will be available in a preprint on arXiv.
Epic said patients are already benefiting from collaboration between humans and AI. At The Christ Hospital in Ohio, Art reviewed routine chest X-ray reports for incidental findings, contributing to more than 100 cases of lung cancer being detected earlier, according to the EHR vendor.
