HOSPITALS
What does the long-term future hold? The long-term future of EHRs remains clouded. Although the speakers’ responses spanned consumer behaviour, regulation and the very location of“ intelligence” in the healthcare knowledge ecosystem, each tilted toward the same underlying idea: information is becoming something active that finds and supports people, rather than something people search for.
Michelle referenced the results of a recent EY consumer health survey showing that 76 % of those surveyed view AI tools and search engines as reliable sources of health information.
The result, she says, is that“ patients are arriving at appointments more informed, asking more targeted questions and expecting more personalised and timely answers.” She frames the broader trend as“ the convergence of predictive care, connected care and the rise of the AI-informed patient.” She predicts EHRs will shift from documenting what happened to helping clinicians“ anticipate what is likely to happen and recommend next best actions”.
Michelle’ s also echoes Tim’ s points on ensuring AI is properly embedded on a structural level:“ The organisations that derive the greatest value from AI will not necessarily be the first to adopt it. They will be the organisations that build the strongest foundation of interoperable, trusted, and well-governed data.”
Daniel brings the regulatory dimension into focus, noting that the human oversight obligations of the EU AI Act – the world’ s first legal framework governing AI – have taken full effect from August 2026, meaning“ clinical decision support sits squarely in its high-risk category.”
As a result, he predicts“ a genuinely new role to emerge in health IT” dedicated to auditing agent activity, and the“ model to shift quickly from human-in-the-loop, where a person approves each action, to human-on-the-loop, where a person supervises a fleet of agents and intervenes on exception.”
“ That transition, not the AI model capability, will determine how fast health systems can safely move,” Daniel argues.
Tim offers the most structurally distinct prediction, explaining that the biggest change may happen outside the EHR itself, in“ a layer of intelligence between the underlying health record and the clinicians and patients who need to use it.”
For patients, he envisions authenticated AI experiences that“ securely use a patient’ s history to help them understand information, find the appropriate care and navigate tasks,” and eventually“ personal AI agents [ that ] could begin interacting directly with provider systems on a patient’ s behalf.”
“ That doesn’ t make the EHR obsolete,” Tim says.“ It makes the EHR increasingly the infrastructure rather than the experience. The real shift is from making people search for healthcare information to making the right information and next action find them.”
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