OpenAI has added an Epic EHR integration and a public health data plugin to ChatGPT for Healthcare, with San Francisco-based UCSF Health serving as a pilot partner.
The Epic integration lets authorized clinicians at healthcare organizations with supported Epic environments pull together patient information — including appointment notes, lab results, medications and specialist documentation — inside ChatGPT or directly within Epic workflows, OpenAI told Becker’s on Sept. 1.
“As a pilot partner, we’re exploring how the new EHR integration with ChatGPT for Healthcare can help clinical teams understand what has changed and what matters most across a complex patient record,” UCSF Health President and CEO Suresh Gunasekaran said in an OpenAI blog post. He said the technology has the potential to reduce time spent synthesizing data and give clinicians more time with patients.
UCSF Health is OpenAI’s featured pilot customer for the integration, and other health systems are exploring the tool, an OpenAI spokesperson said.
The company said the integration is read-only and does not write information back to the patient record. It supports two use cases: reviewing authorized patient data within ChatGPT, and embedding ChatGPT directly into an EHR layout for in-chart AI assistance.
The Healthcare Public Data plugin connects ChatGPT to nine official public healthcare sources, including ClinicalTrials.gov, CMS Coverage, RxNorm, DailyMed and PubMed. OpenAI said physicians rated 99.1% of ChatGPT responses safe across 4,363 ratings spanning 27 clinical use cases involving connected EHR context. Accuracy ratings for the public data connectors ranged from 93.2% for CMS Coverage to 98.6% for DailyMed.
Administrators control which integrations are enabled, and existing user permissions govern what information each person can access. ChatGPT for Healthcare includes role-based access controls, single sign-on and audit logs, and customers with an applicable business associate agreement can use ChatGPT Work, Codex, apps and connectors in the same workspace to support HIPAA-compliant workflows.
The update builds on ChatGPT for Healthcare’s existing clinical search tool, which draws from thousands of medical sources, as OpenAI continues expanding its footprint among hospitals and health systems following earlier launches of ChatGPT for Clinicians and ChatGPT Health.
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