Epic goes APE (Art, Penny, and Emmie)

Last week, all eyes were on Epic—and buzz around the ambient scribe launch and Microsoft partnership expansion was just one piece of a much bigger story. Epic unveiled a suite of new products: medical foundation model (Cosmos), consumer hub MyChart Central, and AI co-pilots for clinicians (Art), revenue cycle management staff (Penny), and patients (Emmie).

At Rock Health, we’ve tracked consumers’ evolving relationship with health technology for over a decade—so Emmie, an AI chatbot embedded directly into the MyChart patient portal, caught our attention. Notably, consumer use of these tools is already emerging—according to data from Rock Health's 2024 Consumer Adoption Survey, 16% of consumers have tried an AI tool or chatbot to search for personalized health information. The significance of this move may be less the function and more the channel. Consumers are overwhelmingly more willing to share their health data with their provider (89%), compared to with a health tech company (13%) or tech company (7%). Patients might assume their clinician has vetted any technology being used—and therefore extend the trust they place in their care providers to the tools themselves.

Epic's latest play is just the most recent example of increasingly blurred lines between the patient-provider relationship and technology's role in healthcare. Epic has long consolidated clinical and administrative data, but tools like Emmie push that further. By capturing patient questions, decisions, and symptom-checking, Epic gains visibility into information consumers might hesitate to share with a generalist tech company. The EHR giant has already signaled that this data will feed back into tools to support care, but questions remain about how far that influence could reach—and what it means for the future of patient-facing AI tools.

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