Epic touts strong growth of AI features for docs, patients

Epic is rapidly building out artificial intelligence tools integrated into its electronic health record solution as health IT companies strive to keep up with the dizzying speed of AI innovation.

This week, the EHR giant released AI Charting, a built-in feature that ambiently listens during patient visits and drafts the clinician’s note. The AI charting feature also queues up orders based on the conversation. 

Epic CEO Judy Faulkner announced the AI Charting technology during the company’s Users Group Meeting (UGM) in August as part of its collaboration with longtime partner Microsoft.

“AI models are advancing at a rapid pace; we continue to work with Microsoft on AI Charting and use a variety of different models through the Microsoft Azure platform,” an Epic spokesperson said Wednesday.

Clinicians say that by handling documentation work in real time, Epic AI Charting helps them stay focused on the patient while capturing a more complete record of the visit, and the AI feature reduces work after the patient leaves the room, the company said in an announcement.

Epic currently has a 42% share of the hospital market, giving the company massive leverage as it expands its AI capabilities. The company claims that its software is installed in more than 3,700 hospitals and 45,000 clinics globally.

The company highlighted the release of AI Charting along with a growing set of AI capabilities for clinicians, patients and hospital operations during its Winter Cool Stuff Ahead customer event Feb. 4.

During its UGM six months ago, the company unveiled its AI scribe solution, called Art for Clinicians, along with a generative AI copilot for revenue cycle, called Penny, to help with coding and denial appeals. It also unveiled an AI solution for patients, called Emmie, to help patients schedule medical visits and then prepare for them.

During the same user meeting in August, Epic also unveiled a medical foundation model (initially called Cosmos, now named Curiosity) and a consumer hub MyChart Central.

The AI Charting feature is part of Art, and, in addition to drafting visit notes and suggesting orders based on the clinician-patient conversation, the initial release allows clinicians to personalize the structure of both current and future notes using voice commands, such as asking to format the history of present illness as a bulleted list.

“Our developers worked closely on site with physicians across many specialties as we created AI Charting,” Corey Miller, vice president of R&D at Epic, said in a statement. “Feedback has been very positive, and we’re iterating quickly based on what clinicians tell us works best.”

The EHR company touts growing uptake of its AI tech among clinicians. According to an Epic spokesperson, 85% of the company’s customers are live with gen AI across Art, Emmie and Penny. 

Adoption of Epic’s AI scribe continues to scale, Epic said, noting that its Insights feature, which summarizes patients’ medical information to help clinicians prepare for visits, is now used more than 16 million times each month—a nearly 3x increase in usage from November 2025.

More than 200 healthcare organizations now use Penny to automate professional billing coding, the company said, with many seeing a more than 20% reduction in coding-related denials. The AI tool also expedites medical necessity denial appeals, creating these letters 23% faster.

Epic also is expanding its AI tool for patients, called Emmie, to offer conversational assistance within MyChart and over text message. Patients can use it to schedule appointments, get an explanation of their bills, make payments, set up payment plans and generate detailed statements for reimbursement, the company said.

Epic customers are seeing “sustained reductions” in billing-related customer service messages as patients use Emmie to get answers to questions, according to Epic. 

The MyChart Central feature is now live in all 50 states, Epic confirmed. That feature let patients use a single Epic-issued ID to connect their MyChart records across different providers.

Epic is pushing deeper into AI as AI companies increasingly target healthcare. 

It’s estimated that investors poured nearly $1.6 billion into ambient AI companies in 2025 (through the end of September), according to PitchBook data. Ambient AI has proven to be the most successful use case for AI in healthcare so far, and VCs are pouring money into the sector to have a horse in the race.

The healthcare AI market is increasingly competitive as adoption grows with Microsoft-owned Nuance and Abridge being dominant players. Other companies are seeing rapid adoption among providers including Ambience, which raised $243 million in July, Suki, Nabla, which raised $70 million in July, DeepScribe, Eleos Health and Heidi Health.

The healthcare race heated up in January when both OpenAI and Anthropic unveiled product releases aimed at both consumers and provider organizations. Anthropic launched Claude for Healthcare featuring a HIPAA-ready infrastructure for providers and payers, models trained specifically for healthcare and life sciences tasks and native integrations to commonly used medical and scientific databases, including the CMS Coverage Database, ICD-10 codes and PubMed, according to the company. 

A week prior, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health, a hub to let users upload their medical records, as well as OpenAI for Healthcare as a suite of tools for healthcare enterprises.