Clinicians at participating health systems can now bring patient records from Epic, the widely used electronic health record system, directly into ChatGPT for Healthcare, OpenAI announced on September 1 and detailed in press coverage this week. Authorized clinicians can pull in appointment notes, lab results, medications and specialist documentation, then ask the AI to summarize a patient's history or flag what has changed since the last visit.

The integration works two ways: clinicians can bring authorized patient information into a ChatGPT workspace to review history and prepare for visits, or in some deployments ChatGPT is built directly into the Epic screen so clinicians never leave the chart. The connection is read-only — the AI cannot write anything back into a patient's record — and Epic holds records for more than 325 million patients.

Access is limited to organizations under a HIPAA business associate agreement, not individual clinicians. OpenAI lists role-based access controls, single sign-on and audit logs among the safeguards. The move extends ChatGPT Health, which OpenAI opened to all US users in July, into the clinician workflow — where the preparing-for-an-appointment summary may increasingly be written by an AI.