OpenAI and Epic Systems have announced a new integration that allows healthcare professionals to use ChatGPT to directly query electronic health records, marking a notable advancement in how clinical teams access and synthesize patient data. The partnership, unveiled on September 2, 2026, is designed to reduce the friction providers face when navigating the EHR before and during patient interactions.
Alongside the Epic integration, OpenAI also released its Healthcare Public Data plugin, a dedicated tool that directs ChatGPT to draw answers from nine official healthcare datasets, including PubMed, DailyMed, and the CMS Coverage Database.
Connecting Clinical Data Across Systems
In its official announcement, OpenAI outlined the core challenge the partnership seeks to address. “Healthcare organizations need AI that works across the systems and information central to care and operations,” OpenAI stated. “Patient context, medical evidence, public healthcare data, and organizational knowledge often live in different places. Connecting these sources in a governed workspace helps teams find the right information, understand it in context, and put it to work across the business.”
Through the ChatGPT EHR integration, clinicians can now query patient-specific information directly within the AI environment. Use cases include identifying which screenings a patient is due for or determining which lab results a clinician should review ahead of an appointment. In select deployments, ChatGPT will be embedded directly into the EHR workflow, allowing providers to access AI capabilities without leaving the patient chart.
UCSF Health Among First Pilot Partners
UCSF Health served as a pilot partner on the project, giving the integration a real-world clinical testing ground. Suresh Gunasekaran, president and CEO of UCSF Health, commented on the technology’s potential in the press release: “By bringing relevant information together more quickly and comprehensively, the technology has the potential to reduce time spent synthesizing data and give clinicians more time with patients. We’re also engaging frontline teams to validate these capabilities in practice and help shape where they can add the most value.”
Healthcare Public Data Plugin: Nine Trusted Sources
The Healthcare Public Data plugin represents a focused expansion of ChatGPT’s capabilities within clinical and research environments. Rather than relying solely on general training data, the plugin directs the AI to pull responses from nine verified public health resources. These sources are ClinicalTrials.gov, the CMS Coverage Database, CMS Open Data, DailyMed, openFDA, Medicare Care Compare, the National Plan and Provider Enumeration System, PubMed, and RxNorm.
OpenAI described the plugin as building on ChatGPT’s existing ability to help teams answer clinical questions and synthesize medical research. The OpenAI healthcare offering now goes further by anchoring responses in official, publicly available data. A research team, for instance, could use ClinicalTrials.gov to identify trials in active recruitment, while a pharmacist could consult DailyMed for the most recent medication warnings. Teams performing multidisciplinary work, such as population health teams, can query all nine sources simultaneously.
Safety and Accuracy Evaluated Across Clinical Use Cases
OpenAI emphasized the safety and accuracy standards behind the ChatGPT EHR integration. The company noted that it worked alongside physician partners to evaluate the connected EHR context across 27 clinical use cases. Across a total of 4,363 ratings, physicians rated 99.1% of ChatGPT responses as safe across all use cases. Additionally, 93% of tested responses were rated as having “good” or better accuracy.
The dual release of the Epic Systems integration and the Healthcare Public Data plugin positions ChatGPT as a more structured and verifiable resource for clinical teams, supported by real-world pilot data and direct integration into established healthcare workflows.
