ChatGPT Connects to EHR, Epic’s AI Game
From Fierce Healthcare:
ChatGPT for Healthcare, initially announced in January, as a workspace for researchers, clinicians and administrators, powered by GPT-5 models that went through doctor-led testing. The company developed a suite of tools for healthcare enterprises as it expands its reach to hospitals and health systems. In April, OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Clinicians, a version of ChatGPT designed to support clinical tasks like documentation and medical research.
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT for Healthcare now integrates with Epic's electronic health record (EHR) to enable authorized clinicians to access and summarize patient information from medical records within ChatGPT or directly in supported Epic workflows. That integration can now pull together clinical notes, lab results, medications and specialist documentation, the company said in a blog post.
What’s interesting to note is that this isn’t Epic’s first integration with OpenAI models. The first one dates back to 2023 and goes via Microsoft Azure (Microsoft has a 27% stake in OpenAI), from PR News:
Microsoft Corp. and Epic on Monday announced they are expanding their long-standing strategic collaboration to develop and integrate generative AI into healthcare by combining the scale and power of Azure OpenAI Service1 with Epic's industry-leading electronic health record (EHR) software. The collaboration expands the long-standing partnership, which includes enabling organizations to run Epic environments on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
This co-innovation is focused on delivering a comprehensive array of generative AI-powered solutions integrated with Epic's EHR to increase productivity, enhance patient care and improve financial integrity of health systems globally. One of the initial solutions is already underway, with UC San Diego Health, UW Health in Madison, Wisconsin, and Stanford Health Care among the first organizations starting to deploy enhancements to automatically draft message responses.
While the initial Microsoft partnership brought the GPT-4 model directly into the Epic environment and workflows, the new partnership with OpenAI will export data from Epic and import it into ChatGPT’s own workspace environment, even as for certain scenarios the ChatGPT agent will be directly accessible from within Epic.
For now OpenAI’s data access is read-only, but the goal is clearly owning the primary interface of interaction and thus the relationship with the clinicians. In comparison, Microsoft is positioning as a service provider that offers not just a secure cloud environment purpose-built for Epic, but also a list of foundation models to choose from, in which GPT-5 is only one of many.
This is an important differentiation - Microsoft is not competing with Epic, even as it already has a considerable market share in the healthcare IT market, which is particularly relevant for Europe, where GDPR reigns. Instead, they are serving as a platform that promises to preserve the data moat of its customers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella puts it clearly in his essay:
[A] company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique.
Epic’s Agent Factory is a great example of what that looks like in the healthcare space. So with all that being said, I can’t help but wonder about the purpose of the OpenAI integration. Epic already has everything it needs thanks to Microsoft - access to the best models, secure and GDPR-compliant cloud and a long list of potential customers. Why give up the EHR data for an agent that might already exist internally? There is only one thing that is in short supply everywhere, that was likely also missing for Epic if they were to continue to expand with the speed that they have, and that's inference.