Vendor roundup: Big names make moves to bring AI into the EHR

The battle of the brands continues in the electronic health record (EHR) space as some of the biggest and longest-standing vendors unveil their latest creations. Artificial intelligence is the name of the game these days, with major companies such as Epic Systems, Oracle, and athenahealth all unveiling AI-powered capabilities in rapid fire succession over the past few weeks. 

Here’s the latest on how EHR market leaders are looking to bring integrated, intuitive AI capabilities into the everyday workflow. 

Oracle brings agentic AI into the user experience 

First up is Oracle, continuing to build on its Cerner acquisition with new cloud-based capabilities that draw on its other digital strengths. The company is taking an all-new approach to a totally revamped EHR, and may be among the first to bring AI agents into the healthcare experience in a coordinated, meaningful way. 

Former CMS Administrator Seema Verma, now in the role of executive vice president and general manager at Oracle Health and Life Sciences, took a not-so-subtle dig at Epic when explaining the new approach to agentic AI and highlighting Oracle’s open ecosystem that allows users to build their own agents or integrate third-party options. 

“While our competitors seem content with bolting features onto antiquated technology, we took on the enormous and highly complex challenge of creating an entirely new EHR, built in the cloud for the Agentic AI era,” she said. “Our agents act as smart assistants that can dynamically surface critical insights and queue suggested actions while enabling clinicians to remain in control. This is the future of intelligent care, where our healthcare providers are freed from technical baggage so they can focus on caring, connecting, healing, and preventing illness.” 

The company says its new tools are trained on high-quality data and don’t just interpret text. Instead, “they can understand clinical meaning, enabling richer and more accurate, in-the-moment insights,” the press release states. “For example, they understand which medications align with which conditions, providing better clarity and consistency for physicians while helping to limit risk.” 

Oracle notes that it’s still working on obtaining certifications for its new products, but customers can go live on production versions while the paperwork clears. 

athenahealth touts ambulatory interoperability with cloud-native suite

Just one day later, athenahealth also announced a reimagined, AI-native platform to support its core customer base of ambulatory practices. With a focus on “intelligent interoperability” befitting its status as the first to implement TEFCA across all customers, the new athenaOne platform will be rolling out to partners over the next several months, the company said. 

“We are building the future, using intelligent interoperability to methodically break down the walled gardens that have constrained independent practices for more than a decade,” said Chief Product Officer Paul Brient. “By layering custom-built, AI-enabled solutions onto our industry-leading approach to interoperability, we’re making the promise of interoperability a reality.” 

Among the big differences in the new platform is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which is designed to standardize and streamline communication between AI models and athenaOne’s core. The pilot is expected to enable more real-time integration between disparate data sources so relevant, timely data can be strategically embedded into the workflow, the company says. 

Other notable AI-enabled capabilities will include intelligent summaries that provide overviews of insights from clinical documents, medical and socioeconomic history, and other discrete data points, as well as a generative AI chart assistant that can comb through available clinical data to answer provider queries or generate summaries. 

Epic counters in typical splashy style at annual meeting

Epic’s most carefully guarded secret at its annual User Group Meeting isn’t the features it’s about to unveil – it’s CEO Judy Faulkner’s fantastical costume when she makes one of her rare appearances in public. This year’s ensemble reflected the sci-fi theme of the event, which was itself a nod to how much of speculative fiction has already become reality with the advent of AI. 

The largest vendor on this list had plenty to announce this year, including around 200 distinct AI features coming to patients, clinicians, and partners across the care continuum, including payers.  

According to event recaps from CNBC and Newsweek, Faulkner stated that Epic is “combining the intelligence and curiosity of the human being with the investigative capabilities of gen AI” with AI agents similar to Oracle’s. One of those agents is called Art, which will be able to anticipate desired information during the workflow and draft clinical notes – the next step for Epic’s wildly popular ambient listening solution produced in partnership with Microsoft and its subsidiary Nuance. 

Epic also has a back-office assistant, called Penny, ready help with revenue cycle management, claims management, and coding. Also on deck are AI-driven enhancements to Cosmos, the massive de-identified pool of research data collected from Epic’s hundreds of millions of patient records. As developers build out their approach to applying AI to these assets, users may get access to new predictive tools and other insights into clinical care. 

The new announcements dovetail with the company’s retooled approach to its MyChart patient portal. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Epic stated that MyChart users will now have a single, password-free login that is synched across linked provider organizations to simplify the process of accessing and sharing records. 

What’s coming up from MEDITECH?

A quieter but no less venerable entry in the field is MEDITECH, which holds the third-largest share of the US EHR market. Its annual customer summit is slated for September, and will feature keynotes from Dr. Brian Anderson, President and CEO of the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), and Google Cloud’s Global Director of Healthcare, Amy Waldron, among others. 

The event will feature an interoperability showcase, which will highlight the company’s latest work on its Traverse Exchange interoperability network and FHIR-driven API strategies to enable simplified exchange of data across systems.  

While the event agenda hints at emerging AI capabilities and a focus on APIs, there are no details yet on any really punchy new features that are designed to directly compete with the flurry of late August announcements.  That could just be a media strategy, though, and it’s possible that MEDITECH will, in fact, use its annual meeting to join the growing litany of companies that are pushing hard on the white-hot interest in AI tools.  

Closing thoughts

Overall, it’s exciting to see a bit of a resurgence in the creativity and capability of the EHR market, which has been muddling along for some time without dramatic leaps forward. Artificial intelligence is certainly a catalyst for sales teams looking to shift stubborn market share statistics in their favor, but it remains to be seen if AI agents, next-gen interoperability, and ambient scribes can really make a difference in the clinical and patient experience. 

The hope is that AI will become the rising tide that raises all ships, and bring measurable improvements to perennial pain points across the entire care continuum. The size and scope of these investments from the leading names in the market could be a good sign – but developers, providers, patients, and partners will need to adhere carefully to stringent principles of privacy, security, governance, and ethics in order to turn the razzle dazzle into real-world results. 

Jennifer Bresnick is a journalist and freelance content creator with a decade of experience in the health IT industry.  Her work has focused on leveraging innovative technology tools to create value, improve health equity, and achieve the promises of the learning health system.  She can be reached at [email protected].