A Rare Look Inside Epic's Vision for Physicians' Future With CMO Dr. Jackie Gerhart

Key Podcast Moments

• Epic’s “software-factory” model enables rapid iteration, tighter integration, and faster innovation across healthcare.
• Many EHR frustrations can be traced back to workflow design, personalization, and training rather than the software itself.
• Epic’s new AI tools — Art for clinicians and Emmy for patients — are reshaping documentation, decision support, and patient engagement.
• The “office visit of the future” envisions ambient AI eliminating typing, clicks, and screens between doctor and patient.
• Epic’s evolving partnerships with Microsoft and startups like Abridge highlight how collaboration and competition are driving the next era of healthcare AI.

Epic is often portrayed as the faceless software giant behind one of healthcare’s most polarizing technologies: the EHR. But inside the company’s walls, Dr. Jackie Gerhart is one of a small team of physicians who are working to lead a thoughtful transformation as the company embraces the AI era in medicine. As Epic’s Chief Medical Officer, Jackie is pushing the organization to make its technology not just smarter, but also more humane. She wants Epic to become a digital system that serves the physician, not the other way around.

Throughout the episode Jackie offers a rare glimpse into how Epic operates and thinks: a company built like a “software factory” moving at the pace of code rather than committees. She talks candidly about where the EHR still causes friction, what Epic is doing to fix this, and how AI tools like Art and Emmy could redefine what it feels like to practice medicine in the not-to-distant future.

For physicians who have spent years wrestling with clicks, burnout, and bureaucratic data entry into the EHR, this episode presents an inside look at how we got here and where things might go in the future. Jackie is working to build a future where documentation fades into the background and care once again takes center stage.

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Top 4 Takeaways

• Epic’s “Software Factory” Mentality Drives Constant Iteration
  Jackie describes Epic less as a tech company and more as a “software factory,” a model built on vertical integration and rapid development. Every product sits on a single code base, allowing quick pivots when clinicians identify new needs. During the early days of COVID, she recalls sending photos of paper lab forms to developers and having a unified electronic workflow live within a week. That level of agility, she says, is what lets Epic evolve in real time with medicine itself.
• The Real Problem Isn’t Always the EHR
  Physicians are not shy about their frustrations with Epic, but Jackie says the biggest critiques she hears often have less to do with the platform’s design itself than with training gaps, local governance, and workflow habits carried over from paper charts. Jackie notes that many organizations “digitized bad processes,” recreating outdated forms instead of rethinking them. True improvement, she argues, requires both better tools and better change management. The key is making sure physicians know how to personalize, streamline, and actually use the innovations already built in.
• AI Tools Like Art and Emmy Aim to Rehumanize Care
  Epic’s dual AI strategy focuses on both sides of the stethoscope. Art supports clinicians by handling ambient documentation and surfacing real-time insights, while Emmy empowers patients through MyChart to manage tasks like screenings and prior authorizations. Together, they’re designed to turn data into action. The goal is reducing busywork, clarifying coverage, and aligning the doctor-patient agenda around what truly matters in each visit.
• The Exam Room of the Future Is Already Taking Shape
  Jackie envisions a near future where physicians don’t touch a keyboard or mouse. Voice recognition, predictive prompts, and smart displays will allow information to appear as it’s needed, enabling natural conversation and shared decision-making. It’s an evolution from data entry to data dialogue. The future is one where technology finally fades into the background, restoring the focus to the human connection at the heart of medicine.

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Transcript

Jackie Gerhart:
When you go into Epic, there is a huge spectrum of things that you do there and some of it is amazing and fun and advances medicine and makes you a better doctor. And other of it you see as friction in your workday. And so all of the things that doctors don't necessarily love to do, billing, coding, writing notes, prior auths, things like that, are best done in an electronic record that can be seamlessly exchanged throughout other records. And I think because we are both the place that the friction is and also the place where the innovation is, I think it gives it a very wide space for there to be a lot of opinions.

GW:
Welcome to How I Doctor, where we're bringing joy back to medicine. Today, my guest is Dr. Jackie Gerhart, Chief Medical Officer of Epic. Yes, Epic Systems Corporation, the electronic health record company in Verona, Wisconsin, that you probably use, and that probably shapes the daily experience of many clinicians too. Jackie is a fellow Midwesterner, a family physician, a fellow clinical informaticist, and has been at Epic for almost eight years now. We will talk about what it's like working inside the company that runs much of American healthcare and how Epic defines its mission in a time when AI, ambient documentation and usability, are now terms that are reshaping everything about how doctors practice and think about their work. I am especially excited to talk with Jackie because she brings the clinician's voice into one of the most influential tech companies in the world. And few people really have a clear view of both of the challenges and the opportunities ahead.
Doctor Jackie Gerhart, welcome to How I Doctor.