At its annual Users Group Meeting (UGM) in August, Epic unveiled Ergo Visit, a redesigned approach to the outpatient office visit that uses AI to help clinicians prepare for appointments, stay present during the conversation, and finish their documentation and orders before the patient leaves.
The tool combines several of Epic's existing AI capabilities into a single outpatient visit workflow, spanning the three phases of an appointment:
Before the visit:
Art, Epic's AI assistant for clinicians, generates a focused summary of the patient's record, while Emmie, its patient-facing agent, gathers what the patient wants to discuss ahead of time, so the clinician walks in already up to speed.
During the visit:
Chart with Art, Epic's ambient documentation tool, captures the conversation and drafts the note in real time while the system queues up orders from the clinician’s preference list and loads diagnoses discussed for the physician to review.
After the visit:
The drafted note is finalized, discharge instructions are provided, and follow up care can be easily coordinated. Patients can engage with Emmie in MyChart to ask questions and get responses back relative to their healthcare data.
The announcement caught our attention because the ongoing migration of care to outpatient settings has turned the office visit into a key battleground where systems compete for access, patient loyalty, and increasingly scarce physician time. A tool that rebuilds that visit around AI puts all three in play at once.
To test the tool's capabilities, Epic launched an initial pilot with Ochsner Health, the first health system to put Ergo Visit into clinical use. To learn more about their progress and early results, we spoke with Falyn Curtis, VP of Clinical Systems at Ochsner.