When EPIC, the largest EHR provider in the U.S., launches an AI assistant for clinicians, people pay attention. Their new tools, specifically, Emmie and Art, promises to generate pre-visit summaries, reduce administrative burden, and even place orders or verify prior authorizations. It’s an important moment — and one that confirms what many of us already know:
The biggest problems in healthcare aren’t inside the visit. They’re before it.
Art is EPIC’s clinician-facing AI assistant, and it’s paired with Emmie, their patient-facing chatbot. Emmie helps patients between visits by explaining test results, nudging action, and gathering context. Art then pulls that context, adds chart data, and creates pre-visit summaries or executes tasks.
It’s a leap forward — but also a reflection of how healthcare incumbents are thinking: automate the visit, make the EHR smarter, reduce clicks.
But here’s the problem: smarter software inside EHR's and broken workflows will still result in clinician burnout.
Clinicians are still walking into visits overwhelmed. Patients still feel unseen. And everyone is drowning in documentation.
~15+ minutes: Average time a clinician spends on paperwork per patient
66%: Percent of patients who forget what they planned to say during a visit
29%: Patients who say they didn’t feel heard by their provider
1 in 3: Clinicians say pre-visit prep is their biggest time sink
So while Art is a step in the right direction, it’s designed to serve the EPIC system — not necessarily the clinician in front of the patient, or the patient trying to prepare.
At Alcott, we believe the future of care starts before the visit begins.
Not with documentation, but with understanding — between patient and clinician.
Alcott is a clinician-empowered health intelligence platform that transforms pre-visit chaos into clarity. Here’s how:
For patients: We guide people through natural-language prep conversations that live in their personal health library. They don’t need medical jargon — just a safe space to share goals, symptoms, and questions.
For clinicians: We generate a personalized, AI-powered briefing that shows you what matters — flagged insights, risks, goals, and questions — in seconds. No noise. Just signal.
We’re not a scribe. We’re not a chatbot. We’re the connective layer between patient experience and clinical readiness.
And we’re designed to work with or without an EHR. We feel strongly that the future of healthcare shouldn't be about putting clinicians in front of EHR's -> it should be about the magic that happens for them with a system of action vs system of record. (More to come on this later)
EPIC’s move proves AI is here to stay in clinical care. But it also signals something deeper:
The world is waking up to the fact that visit prep is the wedge — the highest-leverage point to reduce burden, improve outcomes, and restore humanity to care.
At Alcott, we’re building what that wedge unlocks:
Better care alignment before the visit
Fewer no-shows and follow-ups
Higher quality scores and cleaner documentation (not to mention, preventative measures about caring about your health before it's too late)
A connected experience across clinicians, patients, and care teams
You shouldn’t have to wait for your EHR to catch up.
You shouldn’t have to choose between burnout and buried context.
You shouldn’t have to walk in blind.
Emmie and Art help EPIC clinicians and patients work better inside their system.
Alcott helps all clinicians and patients work better together — system or not.
The connected layer is what healthcare has been missing.