Epic says AI charting for clinicians gets strong feedback

Several weeks after launching a new AI-powered documentation tool, Epic says the company is seeing enthusiasm from clinicians.

The electronic health records company just began offering the charting solution, which uses AI to record conversations with patients and offer summaries quickly, along with suggestions for orders.

The technology is part of Art, Epic’s AI for clinicians. Epic launched the charting for doctors in February and just released charting for nurses in March.

Garrett Adams, Epic’s vice president of research and development, spoke with Chief Healthcare Executive® in an interview at the HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition. He says he’s very encouraged by the response so far to “chart with Art.”

“The feedback so far has been incredibly positive," Adams says. “But, you know, I'm really excited for the future and where it's headed.”

He says there will be more opportunities to use AI technology to improve the user experience for clinicians. He says the AI charting is “a foundational framework that integrates tightly with our other AI capabilities.”

• Read more: Voices from HIMSS: Insights on transforming health care

Surfacing information

More hospitals and health systems have been using ambient documentation tools, and they have found they cut down on how much time doctors are spending on charting, often cited as a key source of burnout. Epic is now offering the technology in its widely-used electronic health record system; the company held 42% of the acute care hospital EHR market, according to KLAS Research data in 2025.

Adams says he relishes hearing anecdotes from the rollouts, including remarks that doctors are spending more time with their families and some are reconsidering plans to retire.

“It's so incredibly impactful considering the staff shortages impacting the healthcare industry,” Adams says. “If we're providing tools that make the job more of a joy, people look forward to interacting with it, then that's a dent that we can make in those challenges around the workforce.”

Doctors can also use EPIC’s AI charting to surface information from previous appointments, which can help physicians ask better questions of patients, he says.

“We can anticipate what's all the right information that they would want to review from the chart ahead of time before the visit, and we tee that up in a really condensed, easy to consume format, and this lets them come into the visit much more prepared by finding information they may have missed otherwise in much less time,” he says.

“So even before the visit begins, we can jump start the conversation by giving them all of the information,” he says.

As nurses are beginning to use the AI charting, they are going through questions and Art is summarizing the conversation as well.

Adams points to another advantage of the technology, saying patients are better informed about the care they’re getting.

Nurses are “verbalizing more of what they're going through with the patient, and the patient now understands more about what's being checked, what's being captured,” he says.

‘Conversational’ tool pilot

This month, Epic also launched a pilot at Tampa General Hospital of a new “conversational chat within the chart.” If a doctor is looking for information within the record, the physician can simply ask a question aloud without typing.

“They can just ask a question to the system, just like they would ask a colleague that knows that patient perfectly,” Adams says.

The conversational tool could cover simple questions, such as allergies, to more complex inquiries, such as asking about previous attempts to treat a patient’s migraines and their success, he says.

He says the AI charting can “really reduce the amount of cognitive load that it takes to document and get get credit for your work and all of those things, so that clinicians can focus on, you know, what they want to manifest you before just taking care of patients.”

Designed with clinicians

Adams says Epic gathered input from doctors and nurses in its AI documentation tools.

The AI charting team spent “thousands of hours on site with customers” in recent months to understand what clinicians need.

“I always tell my developers, you don't make anything without physician input,” Adams says. “ And we have a team of internal physicians that collaborate on every one of our Art projects.”

“But then we followed the same kind of model with each of our projects, where some initial collaborations may be with things like our specialty steering squads, which represent clinicians from multiple organizations, health systems and customers. They'll provide input on design and direction early on alongside our internal clinicians. And then we do an early deployment with a rapid phase of feedback and iteration. It is being tuned to the expectations and the real world practical use.”

Epic has other AI charting pilots in specialties underway, Adams says.

Looking ahead in the next year, Adams says he sees another area that is ready for transformation: how predictive analytics are done in healthcare.

Epic is developing “large medical models, not large language models” that speak the language of medical events, he says. And he says they are showing promise in the predictive power in the likelihood of a certain disease developing, or even the possibility of a certain lab or procedure being performed.

“Similar to how we had a kind of revolution in generative AI with things like the GPT models, I think we'll see the same thing with the models that we're building across the predictive space, with a generalized, intelligent model that understands the medicine,” Adams says.