OpenAI Brings Epic Health Records to ChatGPT for Clinicians

OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT directly to Epic electronic health records, pushing the artificial intelligence bot deeper into the clinical workflow and giving healthcare workers a way to query patient information without manually assembling the medical history themselves.

Healthcare organizations can now connect their Epic environments to ChatGPT for Healthcare, OpenAI said on a Tuesday (Sept. 1) announcement. Clinicians can pull authorized information from appointment notes, laboratory results, medications and specialist documentation and ask questions across a patient’s record.

ChatGPT can identify what changed since a previous visit, surface recent lab results, track medication changes and highlight unresolved follow-ups, according to OpenAI. The system points users back to supporting information in the chart.

The integration supports bringing EHR information into ChatGPT and, in some deployments, putting ChatGPT directly inside the EHR interface. The connection is read-only, meaning ChatGPT can retrieve and analyze patient information but cannot write information back into the record, TechCrunch reported. Epic holds data for more than 325 million patients, according to the report.

OpenAI said physicians evaluated the system across 27 clinical use cases, including pre-visit reviews, medication reviews, clinical timelines and handoff summaries. Physicians rated 99.1% of responses safe across 4,363 evaluations.

OpenAI is also introducing a Healthcare Public Data plugin connecting ChatGPT to nine official healthcare sources, including ClinicalTrials.gov, CMS Coverage, RxNorm, DailyMed and PubMed. The company said healthcare teams can use the data to research trial eligibility, medication identifiers, coverage policies and other information without searching each database separately.

The Epic connection extends a healthcare push OpenAI has been on throughout the year. PYMNTS reported in April that OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Clinicians with clinical search, medical research and tools for workflows such as referral letters and prior authorizations.

That followed the January launch of ChatGPT Health, which lets consumers connect medical records and wellness apps so responses can incorporate their personal health information, as PYMNTS reported. The Epic integration moves OpenAI further from answering standalone medical questions toward making ChatGPT an interface across the information clinicians already use.