The TLDR on UGM

Health system executives and developers made the journey to Verona, Wisconsin, this week to hear what new products the electronic health record behemoth will be launching.  

This year’s annual User Group Meeting was more show than tell. Last year, the company made several announcements about AI products, including, controversially, a decision to launch its own ambient scribe. Now the company is showing off its progress. Epic demonstrated how its bots Emmie (for patient questions), Penny (revenue cycle management), and Art (clinician assistant) can collaborate, including through Ergo Visit, which prepares clinicians for outpatient visits. 

It also started rolling out its Agent Factory, which will allow health systems to create their own custom bots. And health systems are vetting Curiosity, a generative AI that it built off its COSMOS research platform.

Other key announcements:  

— Faster diagnostic imaging exchange 

— Real-time prior authorization

— A way to take payments without needing a third party payment provider, which Brendan Keeler called out to me as an underrated announcement.

Controversy: The annual meeting comes amid an alleged federal probe into Epic’s anti-competitive behavior. The reporting represents a new layer in an on-going debate as to whether Epic is behaving anticompetitively or protecting its customers and their data.

Texas attorney general Ken Paxton sued the company in December 2025. It is also being sued by health record rival Particle Health. Both allege Epic adopts practices, through as fees and specific restrictions, with the aim of shutting down its competition. Epic, along with several of its clients, has also sued several telehealth companies alleging that they fraudulently accessed patient data on public health data networks, essentially asserting that these networks and frameworks are not secure. 

In April, I spoke with Sharona Hoffman, professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University, about Epic's vendor services agreement, which third parties sometimes need to sign when they work with Epic’s hospital clients. She pointed out ways in which the agreement heavily favored Epic. The company told me it has since updated language in that agreement and removed certain provisions.

At the same time that questions around how the company handles competition are arising, Epic is having a changing of the guard. Epic’s former President Sumit Rana announced stepping down at the company earlier this summer, though he will be an advisor to Epic’s Board of Directors. Following his announcement, Second Opinion first reported several other key departures including: Seth Hain, Drew McCombs, and Dave Fuhrmann. All were supportive of building Epic into a more collaborative ecosystem, I’m told.  

A key question about Epic’s future, and something I’ll be watching, as its new leadership structure solidifies and it continues to roll out more advanced capabilities and tools, is how it plays with competing products. I’ll be reporting on this and encourage you to send tips. 

—Ruth