STAT+: Epic launches AI Charting, potentially scrambling the ambient scribe market

The nation’s largest electronic health record company, Epic Systems, announced on Wednesday more details around its long-anticipated AI Charting feature, which could disrupt the market for ambient scribes. Several health systems are piloting the tools now, the company said.

“I almost bristle a little when people are like, ‘Oh, it’s an AI scribe,’ and I’m like, ‘No, no, it’s a scribe, but that’s passive. We really want this to be active,’” said Jackie Gerhart, chief medical officer at Epic, in a call with STAT ahead of the announcement. “We’re just going to keep adding more besides just notes. So it’s going to be orders, it’s going to be diagnoses.” 

Epic is hardly the first mover in the ambient scribe space, but given the company’s dominance in the EHR space it can leverage its huge platform and armory of patient records as the reason its product is superior to others. Epic holds 42% of the acute hospital EHR market and 55% of beds, with the next-largest company, Oracle Health, trailing behind at 23% of the market and 22% of beds.

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