Major EHR vendors are racing to dominate healthcare AI, but IT leaders at health systems say their AI strategies extend far beyond their EHR vendors.
Epic, Oracle Health and Meditech, the three largest EHR vendors in the U.S., have leaned heavily into AI in recent months in a bid to turn the EHR into a more intuitive engine that supports clinicians rather than burdens them.
Oracle Health recently expanded its Clinical AI Agent to help clinicians automate the creation of clinical orders during patient appointments. Meanwhile, Epic released AI Charting, a tool that listens during patient visits and drafts clinicians’ notes and suggested orders in real time. The tool is part of Epic’s broader AI suite, Augmented Response Technology, or Art.
Still, health system leaders told Becker’s they are not simply waiting for EHR vendors to dictate their AI roadmaps.
Keith Morse, MD, chief medical informatics officer at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health in Palo Alto, Calif., described the current AI landscape as a “choose your own adventure” environment, with EHR vendors and other technology partners rapidly introducing new AI capabilities.
Dr. Morse said EHR vendors are likely best positioned to dominate AI use cases that exist fully within the EHR, such as translating discharge summaries or patient handouts. However, he said there is still a “massive opportunity” for third-party vendors in workflows that extend across systems outside the EHR.
Jason Joseph, chief digital and transformation officer at Corewell Health, which has dual headquarters in Grand Rapids and Southfield, Mich., said more than half of the organization’s AI roadmap is intentionally aligned with core platforms such as Epic and Workday because “that is where the data lives and where the work happens.”
“The real value of AI comes when intelligence is embedded directly into existing workflows,” Mr. Joseph said.
He added that extracting data from the EHR, applying AI externally and then pushing insights back into core systems creates friction and slows adoption.
Still, Mr. Joseph said third-party vendors continue to differentiate in specialized areas including generalized generative AI, imaging support and voice-enabled tools.
Industry leaders also pushed back on the idea that health systems risk becoming overly dependent on a single EHR vendor for AI innovation.
“I would describe the environment more as ‘drowning in opportunities’ for AI rather than being constrained by a single vendor,” Dr. Morse said.
Mr. Joseph similarly said Corewell Health’s reliance on core platforms is intentional because those systems contain the data, context and workflows necessary to scale AI effectively.
Both leaders said the larger challenge for health systems is determining which AI tools are worth implementing and how to integrate them into clinical and operational workflows without adding unnecessary complexity.
“The bottleneck is honestly us, our ability as a health system to triage and prioritize all the options available to us,” Dr. Morse said.
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