Epic Unveils Agent Factory & Expands AI Tools at HIMSS26

The company announced plans to launch Agent Factory, a fully integrated platform that will allow organizations to build, customize and monitor AI agents capable of reasoning and acting across clinical, operational and patient-facing processes.

Electronic health record vendor Epic previewed an expanded artificial intelligence strategy at the HIMSS 2026 Global Health Conference & Exhibition, including a new platform designed to enable health systems to create and deploy AI agents across healthcare workflows.

The company announced plans to launch Agent Factory, a fully integrated platform that will allow organizations to build, customize and monitor AI agents capable of reasoning and acting across clinical, operational and patient-facing processes. Using a visual builder, health systems will be able to configure agents with local policies and knowledge bases and deploy them on their own timeline.

Epic executives said the platform will also include a library of prebuilt agents embedded within the Epic environment, while enabling organizations to design custom tools tailored to their workflows.

“Epic is going to build an entire library of on-platform agents that are ready to go,” said Phil Lindemann, Epic’s vice president of data and research, speaking earlier this year at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. “But some of the most innovative health systems want a sandbox where they can invent and reimagine. That’s what Factory is intended to be.”

Alongside the platform preview, Epic outlined several new AI capabilities under development. The company plans to roll out conversational AI within Art, its clinical assistant and AI scribe tool. The system will respond to both direct questions and contextual prompts during patient visits, such as retrieving patient trends or summarizing clinical data in real time.

Epic is also developing a diagnostic support feature within Art that analyzes patient symptoms, medical history and outcomes to suggest potential next steps for clinicians.

The company is further expanding Curiosity, its family of generative AI models, with plans to build medical foundation models trained on anonymized real-world patient records. These models aim to predict future clinical events related to diagnoses, medications, procedures and outcomes.

Epic reported that more than 85% of its customers now use Epic AI tools, with several health systems reporting operational and clinical gains.

According to the company, clinicians are completing discharge summaries 20% to 30% faster using Art’s draft hospital course notes. At Riverside Health in Virginia, inpatient insights powered by Art reduced clinician time spent on documentation and communication tasks by up to 32%.

Hospitals also reported improvements in revenue cycle performance. At Summit Health, Epic’s AI revenue cycle assistant Penny reduced medication prior authorization submission time by 42%, while coding-related denials dropped by more than 20% among organizations using the tool most actively.

Patient-facing AI tools are also being adopted. At Rush University Medical Center, Epic’s patient assistant Emmie helped reduce billing-related customer service messages by 58%, while patients at Ochsner Health have rescheduled more than 14,900 appointments through the platform.

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