If there’s any single company that understands or should understand the value of health data and its importance in patients’ lives, it’s Wisconsin-based EHR company Epic.
And yet, while the company announced a whole host of future AI efforts last August, including a digital companion for patients called Emmie, it was OpenAI — which announced ChatGPT Health last week — that has actually given people the power to query their medical records and gain insights. Anthropic is announcing a similar capability for Pro and Max users of its Claude generative AI platform. Like Epic, other companies that demonstrated an understanding of that broad patient need also missed the boat.
But in an interview on Friday, Epic’s chief medical officer pushed back on the notion that this was a “missed opportunity” for the EHR company.
“I would categorize it, instead of a missed opportunity, as thoughtfully developed over multiple years on top of other non-AI MyChart development and AI that’s actually going to be more thoughtful and tuned to your medical history and your personal medical care,” declared Dr. Jackie Gerhart, also a practicing family physician and vice president of clinical informatics.
Gerhart, who has been with Epic for seven years, and another Epic R&D expert took some pains to describe how the company is developing the capabilities of Emmie, the digital concierge, deeply embedded within the EHR and able to not only handle simple queries like “create an exercise plan”or “explain my lab results” but also nudge you to do the things that you should do for better health.
“So one of the Emmie features we released last year, also around February or March, which is it looks at the doctor’s instructions from prior appointments or admissions and creates actionable tasks for the patient. So when you, as a patient, log in, it will tell you that, ‘Hey, these are the two tasks based on your discharge instruction that you need to keep track of,’” said Borno Akhter, who has spent the last 14 years at Epic and is currently leading AI efforts as a software developer team lead.
And that is the fundamental differentiator in Gerhart’s mind between ChatGPT for Health and what Epic is cooking up.
“I think the experience that you might get with entering something into a ChatGPT would be that you’re able to get information back, but it also requires you to input information in and sort of be the forger and the curator of the different pieces of information, and then also know where to go for action and for follow-ups,” she explained. “And I think two key things that are different here is we’re not just looking only for informing patients, we’re actually looking at how we can help them to take action.”
This becomes particularly clear in when a person undergoes a procedure. If that patient logs on to MyChart, Emmie can alert them to things they need to do.
“So the concierge will actually also walk you through some pretty complex workflows like checking in for an appointment, like dealing with postoperative appointments and being able to really have that journey be laid out for you based on exactly the operation that you had done, for example. So instead of saying, ‘I had knee surgery, what should I do next?’ you don’t even have to ask. It anticipates what it is that you might need,” Gerhart explained.
In other words, Epic’s bet is that Emmie (when its features become fully available and when your provider decides they want to pay Epic for this AI functionality) will be a much more robust tool because it lives within the EHR, knows more about you medically than maybe you do and can direct you to perform tasks in addition to scheduling an appointment or answering your medical questions. So far the early adopters have been Rush University System of Health in Chicaho, Ochsner Health in New Orleans and Lehigh Valley Health Network in eastern Pennsylvania (now part of Jefferson Health)
She and Akhter fundamentally believe such a capability should live inside the EHR, where the majority of patient data resides. Not surprisingly Gerhart gently threw some shade on OpenAI’s declaration that ChatGPT for Health is HIPAA compliant, even though it resides outside the EHR. OpenAI has also declared that a patient’s medical data would not be used to train its learning models.
“I haven’t seen that they’ve successfully done the same certification that an EHR-first company has to do to become a HIPAA-covered entity, and so I think that still remains to be seen, and it does beg the question. It is also free too. And so I’m always curious when I’m putting information of my own medical care into something that’s free, what’s happening to it and what the business model is there,” Gerhart noted.
Here are a couple of screenshots depicting how Epic envisions Emmie (story continues below):
Users will be also able to snap a photo of their insurance card and upload it through the MyChart app and Emmie could help answer questions about copays and other insurance-related questions. Separately, it will also be able to pull in data from wearables through Apple HealthKit and Google Fit, Gerhart said.
“There’s also a new Bluetooth standard where you can connect directly from that device to MyChart. So not yet, but maybe in the future, you’ll see different devices on the shelf that say MyChart enabled or directly able to connect via Bluetooth with MyChart,” she noted.
And therein lies the rub.
Several of the slides on the presentation that Gerhart shared had dates. One said “November 2025” but Akhter said those features are still a “month or two” away. One said “November 2026.” Another simply said “Future.”
Does “thoughtfully developed,” as Gerhart described Epic’s AI efforts with its digital companion, necessarily have to mean slow? Innovations in healthcare need to be deliberate given the stakes — everyone appreciates that. Still, one can’t help but wonder — given the pent-up demand that people have and the expertise that traditional marquee healthcare companies possess — why innovations cannot happen faster.
