Epic launches Connectors so its AI agents can work inside other healthcare apps

What Epic announced

Epic, the company whose software runs the electronic health records of many large US hospitals, is opening its AI agents to other apps. In a newsroom post dated 21 October 2026, Epic said it is releasing the ability for app developers to build Connectors, which link other applications to Epic so its AI can fetch information from them and complete tasks inside them. The announcement came on the morning of Open@Epic, the company's developer conference.

Connectors will work with all three of Epic's named AI assistants: Emmie, the assistant for patients; Art, the assistant for clinicians; and Penny, the assistant for revenue-cycle and operations teams. They will also work with custom agents that health systems build themselves in Agent Factory, Epic's platform for creating and running AI agents.

Health systems will be able to browse developer-built Connectors on Epic Showroom, the company's app marketplace, starting in March 2027. Before turning one on, a health system will be able to review what the Connector can do, what information it can read and what it can change.

How Connectors work

Epic describes two directions. A Connector can bring outside information into Epic at the moment someone needs it, such as pulling an ambulance's arrival time from a dispatch app so an emergency department can prepare. It can also let Epic act in another app: a hospitalised patient could ask Emmie for a meal, and Emmie could place the order in the hospital's dietary management system.

Under the hood, Epic is starting with a widely used standard. Johnston Thayer, Epic's vice president of health informatics, told Fierce Healthcare that the company will initially use the Model Context Protocol as the standard for building Connectors. MCP is an open protocol for connecting AI applications to tools and data, and it is the same approach companies such as Workday and Shopify have used to plug their systems into AI assistants. "There may be a different preferred standard in the future," Thayer said, adding that the aim is to use existing standards so developers know how to build to them.

Thayer described Connectors as an extension of Epic's existing API-based integrations into agentic AI. His argument is that agents should not have to imitate people by clicking the same buttons in the same screens. "It's actually not the best way for them to operate," he told Fierce Healthcare, and Connectors are meant to give agents purpose-built access instead. Several Connectors can also be chained, so an agent could complete a multi-step task that touches more than one application.

Examples from Epic and its partners

Epic and three app makers gave concrete examples. Thayer said Emmie could use a Connector to give a patient hospital wayfinding directions, and that a surgical team's tools could check a medical-equipment app for the availability of assistive devices a patient will need during recovery. Derek De Young, who leads Agent Factory development, said Connectors open up ways to save people from "swivel-chair" work, switching from one app to another.

Availity, a health-information network, says it sees uses in insurance coverage checks, prior authorisation and claims management. Gozio Health, which already provides wayfinding inside Epic's MyChart patient app, wants to guide patients from parking to their appointment and back. VPL says linking its VPLRx pharmacy-logistics platform would let care teams tell patients exactly when a medication will be delivered.

Thayer also described a scheduling case in which Emmie helps arrange a follow-up appointment for an older patient without transport, considering travel options while also pulling the weather forecast for that day. Health-system executives, he said, are interested in linking Art to document-management systems and linking agents to IT ticketing tools so they can see a clinician's original request when helping IT staff make configuration changes.

Permissions and safety

In healthcare, the hard question about any AI agent is who decides what it is allowed to touch. Epic's answer is that each health system does. "Permissions are all handled at the health system level," Thayer told Fierce Healthcare, describing reviews by a hospital's security, legal and compliance teams before any information flows. "There are not situations where that information starts flowing without their teams having the chance to take a look and approve it," he said.

Epic also says Connectors will not give its assistants new autonomous powers. According to Fierce Healthcare, Thayer said the agents will keep operating within existing guardrails even when they draw on third-party apps, and that the tasks Emmie can perform, such as helping book an appointment, are ones Epic has agreed with its customers are safe for now. Epic says its assistants follow human-in-the-loop design and that it runs "thousands of test cases and evaluations" on Emmie regularly.

Those are Epic's own descriptions, and no outside group has yet tested the system. Connecting an agent to more apps also widens what can go wrong. The same pattern elsewhere, such as Workday's Sana agents acting inside Claude over MCP or Shopify's Shop MCP checkout for AI agents, has relied on per-action permissions and user confirmation, and hospitals will want at least that level of control over anything that can place orders or read patient records.

Timeline and cost

Epic plans to begin testing Connectors with some health-system partners by the end of 2026, Fierce Healthcare reports, ahead of the March 2027 Showroom listing. Epic will charge developers to distribute their Connectors through Showroom but has not disclosed prices. Thayer said the fees cover the infrastructure work Epic does to make the connections available and that pricing will be shared with any vendor that wants to list.

For hospitals, that means nothing changes immediately. The first Connectors will come from partner pilots, and broad availability depends on developers building them, Epic reviewing them for Showroom and each health system approving them one by one.

Why it matters

Epic's position makes this more than a routine product update. A great deal of hospital work happens in Epic, but much of it also depends on separate systems for transport, food service, pharmacy logistics, billing and IT. If Epic's agents can reach into those systems through a common standard, Epic becomes the place where the work is coordinated, and third-party apps become tools the agents call on.

That is good news for app makers that get approved Connectors, and a strategic gain for Epic, which keeps the agent and the patient relationship inside its own software. It also raises familiar questions about a single vendor controlling a marketplace, since developers will pay Epic to reach its customers' agents.

What is still unknown

Epic has not said which health systems will pilot Connectors, how many developers have signed up, what Showroom fees will be, or how it will review Connectors for safety before listing them. It has also not said how errors will be handled when an agent acts on information from another app, or how actions taken through a Connector will be logged for clinicians and auditors. Those answers will matter more than the examples once real hospitals start switching Connectors on.