Last week at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas, Epic announced its new “agent factory” — a drag-and-drop platform which lets health systems build and deploy their own AI agents inside Epic.
Epic has already released three persona-based AI agents: Penny, built for revenue cycle tasks; Art, designed to help clinicians document and code; and Emmie, intended to assist patients with scheduling, visit preparations, lab result explanations and general health advice.
The EHR giant’s AI agents enable workflow-level thinking, according to Phil Lindemann, Epic’s vice president of data and research.
“Historically, someone would be an expert in scheduling, an expert in referrals, an expert in the patient portal. Now with Penny, Art and Emmie, you can say, ‘I want to redesign an entire process that involves scheduling, referrals and patient experience,’ and it wires those all together. It allows people to think higher than an app level,” Lindemann explained.
Essentially, instead of focusing on individual applications like scheduling or referrals, health systems can now redesign entire care or operational processes that span multiple parts of the EHR. The new agent factory is meant to orchestrate those workflows and make it easier for hospitals to develop cross-system AI agents.
It’s designed for rapid experimentation, with new tools sometimes going from concept to deployment in just days or weeks, Lindemann pointed out.
“It’s for the customer who says, ‘I’ve got new ideas’ — they’re at the bleeding edge, they’ve got these great new care models they want to implement. Factory basically gives them a standardized way to do that, with the existing guardrails and controls for them to deploy agentic workflows across the entire system,” he remarked.
Jackie Gerhart, Epic’s chief medical officer, added that the factory puts hospitals “in the driver’s seat” by allowing them to design tools and implement changes based on the problems they’re trying to solve.
Rather than vendors dictating solutions, providers themselves can shape their own workflows and innovations.
Another leader in the EHR space, Adam Farren, CEO of Canvas Medical, applauds what Epic is doing and thinks the company is taking the right approach — but said that he doesn’t think hospitals are ready to take advantage of the platform yet.
First, providers have to demonstrate early wins with “narrow agents” that solve specific problems before attempting broader workflows, he stated.
“Show what’s possible, and the details matter, and often a narrow job accomplished with an agent is much more impactful than a more complex workflow with broader surface area for error,” Farren explained.
He also urged healthcare organizations to embrace the fact that unlike earlier versions of automation, agentic AI can ingest and interpret context. That context includes the patient’s medical record, the hospital’s protocols and standing orders, and the history of similar clinical encounters.
Farren believes hospitals will need to start with narrow, high-impact agents, as well as fully leverage patient and organizational context, in order to make agentic AI truly useful and safe.
Photo: MASTER, Getty Images
