OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT Health to Epic's electronic health records system, letting clinicians pull patient data and use AI to summarize notes, lab results, and medications. The integration also adds a new plugin that can search clinical trials, drug databases, and medical literature.

• Clinicians can now access ChatGPT directly within Epic workflows for pre-visit reviews and building clinical timelines without leaving the patient chart
• OpenAI tested the system on 4,300 physician responses across 27 clinical use cases and reported 99.1% safety rate, though the company acknowledges even rare unsafe answers can cause harm
• New Healthcare Public Data plugin pulls information from ClinicalTrials.gov, CMS Coverage, RxNorm, DailyMed, and PubMed to help with trial eligibility and medication identification
• OpenAI maintains read-only access to health records—the AI cannot write data back—and continues to state AI is unsuitable for diagnosis or treatment

OpenAI announced ChatGPT can now plug directly into Epic's EHR system, letting clinicians summarize charts and access patient data without switching apps. The author argues this is a major distribution win that absorbs the entire business model of thousands of healthtech startups—but it's not a technological breakthrough, and most specialized health AI companies will still die because they lack the workflow integration, liability ownership, and regulatory capabilities that actually matter.

• OpenAI's Epic integration directly threatens startups built on the pitch "AI that plugs into your EHR and saves time"—that exact value proposition is now baked into ChatGPT for free or cheap
• Distribution and deep workflow integration are the real competitive moats in healthcare AI, not better models or clever prompting; specialized companies with regulated write-back capabilities and liability ownership will survive, others won't
• OpenAI's 99.1% safety claim is marketing spin, not peer-reviewed validation, and the company still lacks the medical expertise and liability framework that established players like UpToDate have built over decades