Health systems that run Epic have already watched the EHR absorb one category of outside software.
“Very few of us who are Epic customers continue to use an external video tool for our care,” Jeff Gautney, senior vice president and CIO of Chicago-based Rush University System for Health, noted this month at Becker’s 14th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable in Chicago. “We use the Epic tool that’s embedded.”
Mr. Gautney drew that comparison while discussing AI Charting, the ambient documentation tool Epic released in February.
“And so everything that I buy now that’s a point solution like that, I assume it’s going to go away at some point and that I’m going to have to build it into my bigger chassis and increase my cost that way,” he said.
Epic has given health system technology leaders more reasons to think that way in 2026. Beyond AI Charting, the company has announced an enterprise resource planning suite, a long-term IT staffing program, a prescription price comparison tool and automation for payer-provider transactions, pushing into businesses where it is the newcomer.
At Atlanta-based Emory Healthcare, that expansion has changed the first step in evaluating a new tool.
“If we have organic demand from a department or a unit or a leader for something, Epic is one of the first places we’ll check first to see if it’s already available or on roadmap,” Chief AI Officer Nabile Safdar, MD, told Becker’s in November.
Here are six health tech solutions most exposed to Epic’s expansion, based on Becker’s reporting:
1. Ambient AI documentation
Epic rolled out AI Charting on Feb. 4, a built-in tool that listens during patient visits and drafts clinicians’ notes and suggested orders in real time. It entered a market outside vendors built: Ambient AI scribes made up a $600 million market in 2025, according to Menlo Ventures. In October 2025, Epic said it would close the ambient voice recognition track of Workshop, a program through which it had codeveloped software with outside companies.
Customers signaled where they expected to land before the tool launched. In a September 2025 KLAS Research report based on interviews with 35 Epic customers, 54% said they were “very likely” or “likely” to adopt Epic’s ambient tool within two years, and most expected Epic to eventually become their exclusive ambient vendor. Some planned to keep specialty-specific products alongside it.
At Mass General Brigham’s World Medical Innovation Forum in September, Ada Glover, chief product officer at interoperability startup Zus Health, explained during a panel why documentation sits squarely in Epic’s path.
“Those AI scribes are going after the most core element of the EMR, arguably, which is documentation,” she said. “That’s clearly going to be an area where the EMRs themselves really dig in and try to establish a footprint.”
2. Clinical communications
Some capabilities have crossed into Epic’s core product without a headline launch.
“While Epic may be nearing saturation in the EHR market, it still has significant room to grow by expanding both the depth and breadth of its offerings,” Joy Oh, chief information and digital transformation officer at Cincinnati-based Christ Hospital Health Network, told Becker’s in May. “We are already seeing this shift, as Epic brings capabilities previously provided by third parties — such as clinical communications and digital scribe — into its core platform.”
3. IT consulting and staff augmentation
Epic unveiled Rangers at its August Users Group Meeting, a program that embeds Epic-hired, Epic-trained employees inside a health system’s own IT team on an extended basis. Boost, Epic’s existing program, places staff on time-limited projects. Epic has said Rangers is intended to meet a need many customers have raised.
Aaron Miri, DHA, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health, compared Rangers to Epic’s ambient announcement, which he said “somewhat froze the industry” for third-party dictation vendors.
“This could have the same chilling effect on the consulting companies out there,” Dr. Miri said in August.
Amy Trainor, BSN, RN, vice president and CIO of New Orleans-based Ochsner Health, pointed to Epic’s Beaker laboratory information system.
“I could see [it helping] on some applications that are hard to find resources — Beaker is one of them,” Ms. Trainor said in August. “Not a lot of resources exist in the third-party field. We would want to come to [Epic] for things like that.”
4. Payer-provider workflow tools
Epic told Becker’s last December it was building payer-provider features that automate coverage discovery, prior authorization, claim status checks and documentation review.
Early results are public. Bethlehem, Pa.-based St. Luke’s University Health Network and UnitedHealthcare said in August they had automated claim status updates for 88% of the claims exchanged between them using Epic’s Payer Platform, according to Epic. UnitedHealthcare has seen a 25% drop in claim status calls from St. Luke’s since the feature went live.
5. Prescription price comparison
Epic is working with pharmacy companies on Prescription Marketplace, a tool that will let clinicians and patients compare prescription drug prices within Epic. The planned feature will display cash prices alongside insurance-based costs before prescriptions are sent. Epic expects to release it in summer 2027.
6. Enterprise resource planning
Epic detailed EpicOps, a full ERP suite, at its August Users Group Meeting. The company has said the suite is purpose-built for healthcare, with areas such as clinician scheduling, medication supply chains, credentialing and cost accounting tied to clinical outcomes.
It is also the furthest-off threat on this list. Epic has said EpicOps won’t be built out systemwide until 2029. Columbus-based Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center is testing only a few EpicOps modules, such as operating room supply management, while keeping its separate ERP platform.
Detroit-based Henry Ford Health is open to it. “We’ll probably be in the next tranche,” Geoff Patterson, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer, said in August. “We won’t be in the early adopters. We’ll just consider it.”
What’s harder to absorb
Not every outside tool sits in Epic’s path, and health system leaders have described what a defensible product looks like.
“It’s unlikely that an EHR vendor is going to say, ‘We are actually going to be accountable for our patient’s blood pressure improving,'” William Gordon, MD, a Mass General Brigham hospitalist, said in September.
Dr. Safdar set a similar bar for the startups Emory considers. “They can’t just be reselling a frontier model with a really good system prompt. It’s got to be deeper than that,” he said.
Fitting into existing workflows matters, too. “Without the integration, it becomes much more challenging to expand to a broader use case,” Eric Podradchik, vice president of digital clinical systems at Somerville, Mass.-based Mass General Brigham, added in September.
Epic is also building a door for outside apps. Its AI Connectors, which health systems will be able to find in Epic Showroom beginning in March 2027, are designed to let Epic’s AI assistants retrieve information and complete tasks in third-party applications. Epic has not said which Connectors will be available at launch.
