Dive Brief:
- Epic rolled out an artificial intelligence tool this week that drafts clinical notes, setting up the nation’s largest electronic health record vendor as a major competitor in the ambient scribe market.
- AI Charting, part of Epic’s AI tool called Art geared toward clinicians, listens during patients’ appointments with providers and can suggest orders based on the conversation. The product also allows clinicians to personalize the note’s structure using voice commands, like asking the tool to format current conditions as a bulleted list, according to a press release.
- Epic plans to expand beyond documentation to make the tool “an active assistant in the room,” Corey Miller, Epic’s vice president of research and development, said via email. “This is really just the start for Art,” he said.
Dive Insight:
Epic first announced plans to roll out its AI Charting tool at the company’s annual meeting in August, joining a growing number of firms offering AI products that help automate clinical notetaking and other tasks.
The market includes tech giants like Microsoft and startups like Abridge and Ambience — which both raised six-digit funding rounds last year. Fellow EHR vendor Oracle Health has its own AI assistant and in 2025 rolled out an AI-backed EHR, allowing clinicians to use voice commands to access patient information.
Epic could prove a significant competitor, given the company’s leading position in the EHR market — already a critical technology for providers. The vendor controlled more than 42% of the acute care hospital market, and nearly 55% of acute care beds in the U.S. in 2024, according to a report published in April by Klas Research.
The newly released AI Charting tool allows clinicians to focus on patients during appointments and create a more complete record of the visit, Epic said. Providers are required to review note drafts and suggested orders before they’re placed, Miller said.
Additionally, when Art is used, Epic and its customers monitor metrics like the number of changes made to drafts, as part of guardrails to prevent AI hallucinations or errors.
“As is the case with all Epic AI, we’ve tested and validated AI Charting extensively before general release. For AI Charting specifically, this process included a lot of time spent side-by-side with the clinicians who pioneered its use,” Miller said. “This level of immersion was key to making sure Art performs well and is truly helpful to clinicians and patients.”
Epic plans to continue to use provider feedback to update the tool. For example, the company is looking to release diagnosis-aware notes in March that connect assessments and plans to specific diagnoses, Miller said.
Eventually, Art should be able to show relevant information to clinicians without requiring them to search for it, like automatically pulling up a patient’s blood pressure trends when discussing the condition.
Epic says more customers are adopting its AI offerings. A feature in Art that creates summaries of patients’ charts to help providers prepare for visits is used more than 16 million times each month, a nearly threefold increase from November, Epic said.
The company also offers an AI-backed operations product called Penny, used by more than 200 healthcare organizations to help automate billing and coding, and patient-facing tool Emmie, which helps users schedule appointments, understand bills and make payments.
