Epic wrapped its 2026 Users Group Meeting (UGM), themed “Meet Me at the Midway,” in Verona, Wisconsin, on August 20, closing a four-day gathering that drew more than 20,000 attendees and nearly 500 sessions, according to the company. Between a keynote from founder and CEO Judy Faulkner and a rapid-fire “Cool Stuff Ahead” product preview, the EHR giant used the week to detail a wave of new AI tools, an expanded international footprint, and a leadership transition, while health IT vendors and analysts weighed what a more AI-forward Epic means for the rest of the market.
HotSpot Take
Epic held its annual Users Group Meeting (UGM) August 17 to 20 in Verona, Wisconsin, drawing more than 20,000 attendees. The company unveiled Ergo, a new AI-native clinical interface arriving in November, alongside Agent Factory for building custom AI agents, Cosmos Curiosity for predictive analytics, and expanded revenue cycle automation. Epic also named Charité in Berlin as its first customer in Germany. The event followed the departure of longtime president Sumit Rana, with four executives, including Seth Howard, expanding their roles to lead the company going forward. Technology partners including Wolters Kluwer Health, Imprivata, and Caregility used the week’s Exhibit Hall to detail their own Epic-integrated product news.
Faulkner’s Keynote: Execution Over Announcements
Faulkner opened the General Session, which reached more than 60,000 total viewers on August 18, by walking through Epic’s track record on the prior year’s commitments rather than leading with new reveals. According to Epic, of the 167 major projects the company announced at UGM 2025, 84 were completed on time, seven were delivered through a Special Update, and 76 remain on schedule, a framing meant to signal that what Epic previews on stage tends to ship.
“AI brings pattern recognition across huge data sets and the ability to iterate quickly. Plus, it’s always available, and it never gets tired.” — Judy Faulkner, Epic CEO
That emphasis on follow-through carried into the AI discussion. Describing how Epic is positioning generative AI alongside clinician judgment rather than in place of it, Faulkner said, “AI brings pattern recognition across huge data sets and the ability to iterate quickly. Plus, it’s always available, and it never gets tired.” She closed her remarks, characteristically, with a simple send-off: “Have fun and learn a lot.”
Ergo and Ergo Visit: A New AI-Native Clinical Interface
The week’s headline product news was Epic’s rollout of Ergo, a dynamic clinician interface scheduled to arrive in November 2026 that adapts to individual practitioner workflows. Ergo ties together several of Epic’s existing AI tools, including Art (ambient charting), Emmie (the MyChart patient chatbot), Penny (revenue cycle automation), and Cosmos (Epic’s de-identified research database), surfacing relevant patient information contextually rather than requiring clinicians to search for it.
A related tool, Ergo Visit, is designed to help clinicians prepare for appointments and build care plans by drawing on the EHR, MyChart, and Cosmos simultaneously. Its “Best Care Choices for My Patient” feature, powered by roughly 320 million de-identified patient records, shows clinicians how a given diagnosis presents across similar patients and compares treatment approaches. The tool is currently live at Ochsner Health and with five physicians participating in Epic’s Garden Plot collaborative for specialty practices.
Agent Factory Puts AI Development in Health Systems’ Hands
AI-assisted tools are increasingly built into clinical workflow, a theme that ran through Epic’s 2026 Users Group Meeting — AI-generated image
Epic also introduced Agent Factory, a platform that lets health systems deploy more than 120 pre-built AI agents, customize them to organizational policy, or build new ones without writing code. According to Epic, customers submitted more than 1,000 agent ideas during a summer build-a-thon ahead of UGM, an early signal of demand for the tool. Broader availability is planned for 2027.
Early adopters have reported measurable time savings. Epic said ECU Health’s use of AI to summarize Transfer Center requests has saved its team an estimated 20 hours a week. SVP of research and development Erv Walter credited the company’s culture of internal experimentation for feeding these products, noting, “So many of our best ideas come out of conversations that happen in those hallways.”
Cosmos Curiosity and the Push Into Predictive Care
Epic’s Cosmos research network, which now spans roughly 320 million patients and 23 billion clinical encounters according to the company, is the foundation for Cosmos Curiosity, a generative AI model set to launch in March 2027. Curiosity is designed to forecast population and individual patient outcomes, including hospital readmission and stroke risk, giving clinicians probability-based insight to inform care decisions and patient conversations.
“Clinicians adopt AI at the speed of trust. Patients adopt it at the speed of desperation.” — Sue Sheridan, CEO, Patients for Patient Safety US
Sue Sheridan, CEO of Patients for Patient Safety US, offered a patient-centered read on how quickly these tools will actually change practice: “Clinicians adopt AI at the speed of trust. Patients adopt it at the speed of desperation.” Her comment underscores a theme that ran through several UGM sessions, that Epic’s AI ambitions will ultimately be judged by clinical trust and demonstrated outcomes rather than feature counts.
Interoperability, Public Health Alerts and Patient Access
On the data-sharing side, Epic reported that 914 million records were exchanged through its Care Everywhere network in June alone, including a substantial share involving non-Epic systems, part of what the company says totals roughly 9 billion records exchanged annually across all 50 states and 10 countries. Epic also expanded Care Everywhere Diagnostic Image Exchange, enabling one-click sharing of diagnostic-quality CT, X-ray, and MRI images between Epic organizations, and rolled out real-time prior authorization checks that let clinicians confirm insurer requirements before treatment begins, now live at several health systems.
On the public health front, Epic’s Health Alerts tool, which monitors diagnosis rates across thousands of ICD-10 codes at the county and state level, has issued 13 alerts since its April launch. According to Epic, the tool flagged a cyclosporiasis outbreak roughly a week ahead of the CDC’s own detection, a claim the company has not published independent third-party validation for but that it says demonstrates the value of aggregating real-time clinical data. The Health Alerts tool is publicly searchable on EpicResearch.org.
MyChart Central, Epic’s single-login patient portal spanning every organization where a patient has received care, is now available in all 50 states, with 346 organizations live and roughly 115 million patients served, according to the company.
Revenue Cycle Automation and the EpicOps Expansion
Epic used UGM to detail continued expansion of its AI-driven revenue cycle tools. The company said its Professional Coding Assistant, live at more than 360 organizations, has helped more than 40 provider groups reduce coding denials by 20 percent or more, while its Denial Appeals Assistant, live at more than 330 organizations, has cut appeal creation time by roughly 23 percent. Epic also reported that its Medical Necessity Insights tool, in use at 180-plus organizations, has saved an estimated 12,500 hours of prior authorization work. Autonomous coding through Penny is now available for radiology and emergency medicine, with surgery and pathology coding in development.
Beyond the EHR and revenue cycle, Epic continued building out EpicOps, its enterprise resource planning platform covering workforce, supply chain, and financial management, functions traditionally handled by separate enterprise software vendors. The company also introduced Rangers, a new staffing model that places permanent, onsite Epic staff at customer organizations, extending its existing Boost support program into longer-term, dedicated coverage.
A First Foothold in Germany
Epic’s UGM update also marked the formal debut of its presence in Germany, where Charité, the Berlin-based academic medical center, became the company’s first customer in the country. Charité signed roughly a €200 million agreement in late 2025 to replace a 20-year-old legacy system, with full implementation targeted for completion by the end of 2029, pending supervisory board approval and financing arrangements with the Berlin Senate.
In Charité’s own announcement of the deal, translated from the original German, board member for patient care Prof. Martin E. Kreis said the rollout would take time, with a goal of having the system in place across Charité by the end of 2029. Board member for finance and infrastructure Astrid Lurati said the new system is intended to create substantial financial value while supporting excellent patient care on a financially sound footing. Epic’s community now spans 17 countries.
Leadership Transition and a Security Partnership With Anthropic
UGM 2026 was also the first led by Epic’s newly distributed leadership team following the departure of longtime president Sumit Rana, who stepped down in August after nearly 28 years with the company. Rather than naming a single successor, Epic expanded the responsibilities of four executives, including EVP of research and development Seth Howard, who led the “Cool Stuff Ahead” session for the first time. Howard described Epic’s approach to internal advancement by noting that “each employee invents their own pathway,” with the company favoring developing leaders internally over external executive hires.
Separately, Epic chief security officer Stirling Martin disclosed that the company is participating in Project Glasswing, an initiative from AI safety company Anthropic that uses frontier AI models to help roughly 150 participating organizations identify and address software vulnerabilities. Epic said it is applying similar AI-driven techniques internally to review its own codebase for security issues as it accelerates its release cycle, which the company says has moved from an 18-month cadence to quarterly releases.
Partners Bring Their Own News to the Exhibit Hall
Epic’s own product roadmap dominated the week, but several longtime technology partners used UGM to detail their own news for attendees browsing the Exhibit Hall, Epic’s term for the expo space where outside vendors meet with customers alongside the main conference sessions.
Ahead of the conference, Wolters Kluwer Health announced an expanded Epic integration bundling its UpToDate Lexidrug and Medi-Span drug information tools with UpToDate Patient Education content, aimed specifically at rural hospitals, federally qualified health centers, tribal healthcare organizations, and other small or resource-constrained systems. The package simplifies procurement and testing by consolidating the three products under a single cost center with pre-validated Epic workflows, reducing the IT and clinical informatics burden typically involved in implementation. Yaw Fellin, senior vice president and general manager of clinical decision support and provider solutions at Wolters Kluwer Health, said healthcare organizations serving rural and underserved populations “need access to the same evidence-based resources used across the broader healthcare ecosystem, but often face significant financial and operational barriers.”
Identity and access management vendor Imprivata used its UGM presence to demonstrate how its tools support Epic workflows rather than announcing new products outright. The company showcased support for Epic’s Specialty Narrator documentation tools used in trauma, code, and sedation events, along with facial-biometric, passwordless authentication designed to reduce password prompts during high-risk tasks such as blood transfusion verification and pharmacy drug compounding. Imprivata also highlighted cloud-delivered identity and access management aimed at Community Connect organizations, the smaller practices and hospitals that access Epic through a larger health system’s shared instance rather than running Epic independently.
Virtual care vendor Caregility arrived at UGM having just secured a second consecutive year of inclusion in Epic’s Toolbox program for inpatient virtual care, announced in July. The designation covers AI-assisted virtual care workflows embedded directly in MyChart Bedside TV, Epic Monitor, Haiku, and Hyperspace, including HIPAA-compliant virtual visits, computer vision-based patient monitoring, and ambient listening for documentation. According to the company, Infirmary Health has already deployed Caregility’s Epic Bedside TV integration for virtual patient engagement across its inpatient units. Caregility CEO Ron Gaboury said, “Care teams need virtual workflows that are accessible within the systems they already use, supported by reliable infrastructure.”
What UGM Means for the Broader Health IT Market
Epic’s expanding AI portfolio arrives as the company already holds a commanding position in the EHR market. Fierce Healthcare reported that Epic now accounts for roughly 43.7 percent of the acute-care EHR market in the United States, a share that continues to shape how digital health vendors think about where to compete rather than duplicate Epic’s own offerings.
“Emphasizing your ability to deploy quickly is hugely important, followed by having a faster speed to ROI.” — Kienan O’Brien, Director, Redesign Health
That dynamic was the subject of a survey Redesign Health published in the weeks ahead of UGM, in which 112 senior health system leaders were asked where AI startups still have room to differentiate. Respondents pointed most often to enterprise imaging and AI add-ons, quality reporting and registries, discharge and care transitions, care access tools such as scheduling and intake, provider data management, and revenue cycle AI, areas where Epic’s platform has less depth or where startups can move faster. Kienan O’Brien, a director at Redesign Health, said vendors need a clear angle to win against an incumbent as large as Epic, noting that “emphasizing your ability to deploy quickly is hugely important, followed by having a faster speed to ROI.” The same survey found that roughly half of responding executives now expect startups to demonstrate significantly higher ROI than Epic’s own tools before switching, with only 18 percent applying the same evaluation bar to both.
That competitive backdrop was already tense heading into UGM. Days before the conference opened, Reuters reported, citing two sources familiar with the matter, that the Federal Trade Commission has been examining Epic’s data-access policies and its use of employee non-compete agreements. The FTC has not confirmed an investigation publicly, and the reporting follows a December lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and a separate suit from data platform Particle Health, both alleging Epic restricts competitors’ access to patient data. An Epic spokesperson denied wrongdoing, telling Healthcare IT News, “We’re leaders in interoperability to support patient care, and we do not engage in anticompetitive behavior,” and pointed to the more than 1,000 APIs Epic has published for use by upwards of 3,000 outside applications.
For health system leaders and clinicians alike, the throughline from UGM 2026 was less about any single feature than about how quickly AI is moving from pilot projects into daily workflow, and how much that shift will ultimately depend on whether patients and providers trust the tools enough to rely on them.
— This original article was created with AI support.
