Epic Unveils Agent Factory for Health Systems to Build Their Own AI Agents

Epic Systems used the HIMSS 2026 conference in Las Vegas to announce Agent Factory, a platform that lets health systems build, customize and deploy their own AI agents inside the electronic health record, along with Curiosity, a family of medical foundation models trained on anonymized patient records, HIT Consultant reported on March 10.

Epic also said that more than 85% of its customers now actively use its AI tools, according to the outlet.

What Agent Factory is meant to do

HIT Consultant described Agent Factory as a fully integrated platform with a visual builder that health systems can use to create AI agents able to reason and act across workflows. MedCity News described it as a drag-and-drop platform for building agents that orchestrate entire workflows across the EHR.

The platform sits on top of three persona-based agents Epic has already released, MedCity News reported: Penny for revenue cycle work, Art for clinicians' documentation and coding, and Emmie for patients, including scheduling, visit preparation and explanations of lab results.

"Historically, someone would be an expert in scheduling, an expert in referrals, an expert in the patient portal. Now with Penny, Art and Emmie, you can say, 'I want to redesign an entire process that involves scheduling, referrals and patient experience,' and it wires those all together," Phil Lindemann, Epic's vice president of data and research, told MedCity News.

Lindemann said the tool is designed for rapid experimentation, with new tools sometimes moving from concept to deployment in days or weeks. Epic's chief medical officer, Jackie Gerhart, said the factory puts hospitals "in the driver's seat," according to the outlet.

Curiosity, the foundation model family, is being trained on anonymized real-world patient records to predict disease progression, medication efficacy and outcomes, HIT Consultant reported.

Results Epic reported from customers

Epic paired the announcements with figures from health systems using its existing AI tools, as reported by HIT Consultant. The company said its ambient listening tool, Chart with Art, became the first ambient scribe built into bedside nursing workflows through a launch at Houston Methodist, and is rolling out for home care in April. At The Christ Hospital, Epic said, Art extracts incidental findings from radiology results to drive follow-up, with an early detection rate for lung cancer of 69%, compared with a national average of 46%.

For billing, Epic said Summit Health cut prior authorization submission time by 42% using Penny, with 92% of AI-generated responses accepted without edits, and that its most active users have seen coding-related denials fall by more than 20%. Emmie was credited with a 58% reduction in billing-related customer service messages at Rush University Medical Center, and Sutter Health patients can now ask Emmie questions inside MyChart. These figures come from Epic and its customers and were not independently verified.

Not everyone thinks hospitals are ready for the new platform. Adam Farren, chief executive of Canvas Medical, told MedCity News that Epic is taking the right approach but that providers should first show results with narrow agents that solve specific problems. "Show what's possible, and the details matter, and often a narrow job accomplished with an agent is much more impactful than a more complex workflow with broader surface area for error," Farren said.

Epic did not give a general availability date or pricing for Agent Factory in the coverage.