When you think electronic health records (EHR), you likely think of Epic, as the healthcare software company has records for 325 million patients and is the largest in the US.
And when you think of the modernization of the EHR, you may think of AI scribes like Ambience, Suki, and Abridge, the note-taking assistants designed to speed up clinical documentation.
Scribes can save physicians 15,000+ hours in work per year, a 2025 study published in the journal NEJM Catalyst Innovations in Care Delivery reported, and between $200 billion to $360 billion in annual healthcare spending, McKinsey and Harvard researchers reported.
But this month, the inevitable happened: Epic announced it was developing its own AI tools, including Art, an AI scribe that will, like other apps, share medical information with clinicians in real time. It’s part of Epic’s “native AI charting” developed in partnership with Microsoft, and is expected to launch for “limited use” early next year, a spokesperson from the company told Healthcare Brew and other outlets.
So what will happen to the scribe startups when the EHR giant releases its own AI tools?
Experts told Healthcare Brew they expect some market shift, but think their technologies provide strong value to providers.
“I wouldn’t be a very good founder if I didn’t think this was already going to happen,” Tom Kelly, co-founder and CEO at AI scribe developer Heidi Health, said.
Evolving products. You may have noticed, but Epic isn’t only releasing an AI scribe. It’s looking to build a suite of AI tools to help everywhere from the patient room to the back office, according to the company.
This highlights a bit of a trend in the health tech industry: Execs don’t want to just make scribes; they’re instead hoping to automate the entire healthcare workflow.
In fact, Ambience Healthcare—one of the leading AI scribe developers in the US, with at least 40 clients like the Cleveland Clinic and the Houston-based Memorial Hermann Health System—made its own expansion announcement, entering a $243 million Series C fundraising round on July 29.
Then on Aug. 19, Ambience released an AI copilot tool, Chart Chat, which works within Epic to provide real-time health information to clinicians, like lab results and prior treatments.
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“We still feel like we’re 5% of the way through everything we possibly want to build,” Nikhil Buduma, Ambience’s co-founder and chief scientist, told us.
Quality counts. AI healthcare company leaders are also confident in their technologies.
The two co-founders said they think Epic will provide an accessible—and possibly cheaper—internal solution, which may be better suited for an outpatient facility. But Buduma said academic medical centers may want something more high tech since they tend to care for more patients and handle more complex cases that require added clinical integration.
It’s also important to differentiate between competitors.
For example, Kelly said Heidi Health is focused on building a tool that can be used in Epic but isn’t necessarily designed to be. This means it can also complete tasks, like helping with forms outside of the medical record, in addition to its note-taking capabilities, Kelly said.
Keeping customers. AI scribe companies also have existing contracts with providers. Ambience and Cleveland Clinic signed an agreement for five years back in February, for instance.
Just because Epic has its own scribe now doesn’t mean these partnerships will disintegrate, the two co-founders said. Buduma said Ambience plans to work with the Cleveland Clinic while further developing its products.
Still, Kelly said he “would never want to let an agreement be the thing that keeps [Heidi’s] customers” adding it’s the health tech company’s responsibility to build an integrated product “that makes it really hard to swap” for another tool.
Where he could see companies running into problems, though, is when their value proposition is their integration with Epic. If Epic is cheaper, doesn’t require additional authentication, and there’s no data-sharing risk, “then it probably will be actually quite easy for [health systems] to swap,” Kelly said.
When contract renewals come around, he expects to see some lower prices because of this. There could also be more mergers and acquisitions, he added.
With this competitive market and increasingly high-tech products, Epic’s announcement "definitely will heat up the market,” Kelly said.