Epic’s “Meet Me at the Midway” User Group Meeting had everything a county fair needs: a cowgirl CEO, a blue-ribbon AI roadmap, and a very large elephant in the room.
Ergo was the main attraction. Judy took the stage in full cowgirl costume to deliver her keynote on “healthcare intelligence,” which now has a name, a November ship date, and a live pilot at Ochsner.
- Ergo pulls Art, Emmie, Penny, and Cosmos into one interface that reshapes itself around whatever each visit calls for.
Curiosity stole the show. Cosmos Curiosity is a generative model trained on 320M deidentified patients and 23B encounters that simulates what happens next for a patient – including whether they’ll be readmitted, and why.
- Twenty orgs are already validating it ahead of a March 2027 release inside the EHR.
Scale got the biggest applause.
- Agent Factory now lets health systems shape 120+ out-of-the-box AI features or build their own agents without code, with wide availability slated for 2027.
- Chart with Art is now live across 70+ specialties and 60+ orgs, and Penny is autonomously coding radiology and ED visits.
- Real-time prior auth checks are already live at four systems, with UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, Network Health, and 16 more payors testing.
Now for the elephant. Although UGC brought plenty of big news, Epic was grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons in the months leading up to the event.
- The FTC is reportedly probing Epic’s non-competes and third-party data blocking, the same allegations behind other lawsuits that might sound particul-arly familiar.
- Epic’s heir apparent Sumit Rana, AI chief Seth Hain, and Care Everywhere architect Dave Fuhrmann all left in the month before UGM, which may or may not have been because they lost an internal build-vs-partner debate over AI. Epic denies it happened.
- Judy is 83, succession is still an unspoken question, and the closest thing to an answer is R&D lead Seth Howard saying that Epic “would never” hire an outsider.
The Takeaway
Judy likes to say that “health IT is more complex than rocket science.” That doesn’t seem to do much for employee retention, but it also didn’t stop Epic from shipping 84 tools it announced this time last year. All signs point to UGM 2026 keeping up the pace.
