HOSPITALS
The diversification of EHRs’ uses means organisations are beginning to view it as“ the digital foundation for interoperability, advanced analytics, predictive insights and more personalised patient care,” rather than simply a place to record and store clinical data.
Tim Lawless, Global Health Lead at Publicis Sapient, also believes this shift is underway. He believes that“ the EHR has spent decades becoming very good at documenting healthcare.”
“ The next challenge is making it better at enabling healthcare.” He argues AI can turn the EHR“ from a system clinicians and patients have to navigate into infrastructure that works more intelligently around them.”
DataArt’ s Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences, Daniel Piekarz, reiterates this point.“ 2026 is the year AI agents in the EHR stopped listening and started acting,” he says. Daniel cites Oracle’ s Clinical AI Agent as kickstarting this shift, while the subsequent release of Epic and eClinicalWorks’ agent-building platforms reframed the market entirely.
“ For thirty years, what an EHR could do was decided by its vendor,” he explains.“ Increasingly it will be decided by the organisations using it.”
Interoperability is a precondition of intelligent EHRs Intelligent EHRs will also be highly interoperable. An inflection point will arrive when“ healthcare organisations will not need to purchase separate AI products for every use case
“HEALTHCARE ORGANISATIONS WILL INCREASINGLY USE DATA AND AI TO ANTICIPATE WHAT IS LIKELY TO HAPPEN AND TAKE ACTION BEFORE ISSUES IMPACT PATIENT OUTCOMES”
Michelle Carmen Global EHR Practice Lead EY
because many capabilities will be delivered natively through the EHR ecosystem,” says Michelle.
She also notes that AI is moving“ beyond clinical decision support into ambient documentation, clinical summarisation, coding assistance, prior authorisation automation and revenue cycle workflows.”
However, she stresses this only works if data can move freely: organisations are“ investing heavily in FHIR-based architectures, shared care records, and enterprise data platforms because AI is only as effective as the data available to it.” Tim remains cautious, warning that layering AI onto disconnected systems is not a fix.
54 October 2026