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 giant 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 is an AI system that surfaces intelligence across Epic’s Art clinical copilot, Emmie patient-facing assistant, Penny revenue cycle agent, and Cosmos research database depending on what each visit calls for.
- Judy shared an “Ergo visit” example where Art pulled relevant info from the chart ahead of time, Emmie talked with patients in MyChart before the visit, and the two combined to generate discussion topics for the physician. Déjà vu.
Curiosity stole the show. Cosmos Curiosity is a new generative model trained on 320M deidentified patients and 23B encounters that simulates what happens next for a patient – such as health trajectories, whether they’ll be readmitted, and why.
- Twenty orgs are already validating Curiosity ahead of a March 2027 release inside the EHR.
Scale got the most spotlight.
- Agent Factory is off to a hot start and now lets health systems shape 120+ out-of-the-box AI features, or build their own agents for specific use cases without having to code them from scratch.
- 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 have been because they lost an internal debate over building-vs-partnering on 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 new AI tools in just the last year. UGM 2026 should keep the pace if a few elephants can be addressed. Ergo, stay tuned.
