A year ago, health system CIOs walking the halls of Epic’s Users Group Meeting were still convincing themselves — and their boards — that generative AI in the EHR was more than a demo. This year, that debate is over. The new one is about speed.
“What strikes me overall is just the pace is blistering,” Tom Bentley, BSN, RN, chief information and digital technology officer of Columbus-based Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, told Becker’s at the EHR giant’s sprawling headquarters in Verona, Wis. “Epic is cranking out new functionality, and I’m thinking what every CIO is thinking about: How do we increase our pace of adoption?”
Epic used its Aug. 18 keynote to detail the scope of that push, including its Agent Factory platform that will soon allow health systems to build their own AI agents, the advancement of Cosmos-powered prediction tools called Curiosity, and the debut of an AI-assisted outpatient visit called Ergo.
This newfound urgency, Mr. Bentley said, is forcing a harder question: “Are we over-customizing, overanalyzing features too much, [which] is causing us to maybe take longer to implement things than it needs to? Are we going to have to rethink our strategy and offer much less of that tailoring and customization to our users?”
Several other health system leaders described a similar shift in tone from the 2025 meeting, when much of Epic’s AI suite — the clinician-facing Art, the patient-facing Emmy and the revenue cycle tool Penny — was still conceptual. At this year’s event, taking place Aug. 17-20, executives said it has become a running product roadmap they have to keep up with in real time.
“It’s nice to see the AI vision that Epic laid out previously actually come into real features and products that are very applicable to big problems we’re trying to solve in healthcare right now,” said Sarah Hatchett, senior vice president and CIO of Cleveland Clinic. “Where last year felt a little more aspirational, this felt like more of a traditional product roadmap.”
“The amount of progress they’ve made compared to last year is just amazing to see,” added Sha Edathumparampil, chief digital and information officer of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Baptist Health South Florida. “The roadmap looks even stronger than last year.”
Cherodeep Goswami, chief information and digital officer of Renton, Wash.-based Providence, said he was struck by Epic’s revelation that it now generates more capabilities and features for each quarterly update cycle than it did previously every 18 months.
He called that a net positive for health systems that had been stuck waiting on point solutions to catch up to what Epic could already do natively. But he noted the strain that puts on the people expected to deploy it.
“Our operators are working long hours and don’t necessarily have the time to create or consume training for these new features. If not done correctly and consistently, it will create care gaps, and that can be a risk,” Mr. Goswami said. “AI has done a great job in fast-tracking production. Together, we will now need to explore opportunities to reduce the training burden using AI. In short, the factory has created the production. The question is: Is the consumer ready to consume all of it?”
CIOs’ enthusiasm came paired, almost universally, with a version of the same worry: whether health systems can absorb what Epic is shipping fast enough to get value from it — or govern it responsibly while trying.
Geoff Patterson, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer of Detroit-based Henry Ford Health, said the bottleneck has shifted away from the technology itself. “We’re at the point where people have to get comfortable and trust it,” he said.
Mr. Patterson compared it to the industry’s earlier resistance to EHRs in general: “I remember when EMRs were coming. It was like, ‘Well, we’re never using a computer for charting or taking care of our patients.’ And now, if you have a downtime for any reason, people are like, ‘I never want to go to paper again.’ I think we’re at the cusp of something like that” with AI.
Eric Neil, CIO of Seattle-based UW Medicine, said the volume of new AI tools arriving from Epic and other vendors has itself become the challenge to manage.
“How do you sift through everything to find the solutions that are going to deliver real value to the patients and to the organization?” he wondered. “People are talking about pilot fatigue, and we just don’t have the resources and time and capacity to go pilot everything.”
Mr. Neil said he’d like to see the industry find ways to evaluate new tools collectively rather than each health system testing everything on its own.
At Somerville, Mass.-based Mass General Brigham, Chief Health Information Officer Rebecca Mishuris, MD, said the development pace has changed how her team thinks about postponing IT decisions.
“It used to be if you didn’t like some clinical system feature or it didn’t meet your need, you could put it in your drawer for at least a year, if not longer,” she said. “Now, in three months, it could have far surpassed where you thought it should be to drive adoption. So it’s hard to know when to go back, but it’s not a year anymore. The cycle time has shortened significantly.”
Eric Podradchik, vice president of digital clinical systems at Mass General Brigham, said the acceleration is testing his team’s ability to build against it as much as clinical leaders’ ability to adopt it.
“As [Epic is] pushing for quarterly updates and talking about how much more code and how many new features, it’s literally impossible to keep up with that … so needing tools to be able to deliver it faster [is] critical,” he said. “A lot of times we’re the bottleneck in terms of our ability to provide the capabilities and the timelines that [clinical operations] want, which are … exceedingly fast.”
Not every reaction was about strain. Amy Trainor, vice president and CIO of New Orleans-based Ochsner Health — the first health system live with Epic’s Ergo Visit — watched a live demonstration of the tool and came away struck by how little of the appointment ran through a keyboard. “The power is striking,” Ms. Trainor said. “If I wouldn’t have seen that for myself, I wouldn’t have thought it was going to be as amazing as it was, and it kind of just opened my eyes to the possibilities.”
The Ergo Visit ambiently surfaces relevant chart data, drafts orders and generates after-visit summaries in real time during patient encounters.
The tension between excitement and readiness ran through a conversation Becker’s had with several CIOs following the Aug. 18 general session.
Aaron Miri, DHA, chief digital and information officer of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health, said the industry still lacks the tools to prioritize among Epic’s expanding AI portfolio.
“We just have to get the sophistication and maturity so as CIOs, we can monitor and truly inform the business: Here’s your first bet, here’s your second bet, here’s your third bet — versus just going all in on everything at one shot,” he said.
Maggie Helms, senior vice president and chief data, AI and digital officer of Bloomington, Minn.-based HealthPartners, said she was encouraged by the tempo of Epic’s roadmap but wanted more proof it was ready.
“We’re hoping for a few more live demos,” she said. “It’s tough to know the maturity of some of the Cool Stuff Ahead” — including Epic’s forthcoming Emmy voice agent, which she said she’s curious about but can’t yet gauge.
Steven Beal, senior vice president and CIO of Fountain Valley, Calif.-based MemorialCare, said the engineering intensity raises a cost question that hasn’t caught up yet.
“On the back end, something’s running the machines,” Beal said. “If all this stuff is doing the work for you, great, and you could have potentially great outcomes. But how are we getting in front of the cost? It shouldn’t just shift from people to machines — and at a more expensive pace than that. That’s a key thing for us.”
Scott MacLean, senior vice president and CIO of Columbia, Md.-based MedStar Health, said the speed of Epic’s development is even reshaping how his organization times other major technology decisions, including an upcoming enterprise resource planning project. Epic is developing its own ERP expected to be complete in 2029.
“It’s going more rapidly all the time,” he said, adding that MedStar has resorted to signing shorter contracts with vendors to bridge the gap until it’s clear how quickly Epic’s tools will mature.
Sonney Sapra, chief information and technology officer of Charlottesville, Va.-based UVA Health, said his system is still in the early stages of rolling out Art, Emmy and Penny but described the unified AI platform as a net positive. He said tracking token usage and projecting AI costs before deploying will shape which tools UVA Health adopts next.
Some CIOs pointed to Epic’s newest tools as a direct response to the speed of tech creation rather than a contributor to it. Ryan Smith, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer of Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health, said Agent Factory — Epic’s new platform for building and governing AI agents, which now requires Epic staff but will be open to health systems to go it alone in October — addresses the bottleneck internally.
“Agent Factory is another area of excitement since it gives organizations a governed way to build their own agents inside the system, addressing any number of potential use cases,” he said. “On the IT side, I’m glad to see Epic delivering analyst build tools to reduce the effort required to support build activities.”
Tim Skeen, executive vice president and CIO of Norfolk, Va.-based Sentara Health, pointed to the same tool, saying Agent Factory and the ability to get his own staff certified to build directly on the platform was what excited him most at UGM.
“The limiting factor may no longer be the technology but our ability and capacity for change,” said Bruk Kammerman, senior vice president and CIO of Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Avera Health.
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