Epic Connectors and Agent Factory: How to Get Your App Ready for 2027

On 21 October 2026, the day before Open@Epic, Epic announced Epic Connectors. A Connector lets an outside app talk to Epic's AI agents, including the custom agents hospitals build in Epic Agent Factory. The agent can pull a fact from your app into Epic, and it can ask your app to do something on a patient's or clinician's behalf. Health systems will be able to find developer-built Connectors on Epic Showroom from March 2027.

If you sell software to Epic hospitals, this changes how your product reaches clinicians, patients and revenue cycle teams. We build Epic integrations for health-tech companies, so we read everything Epic published and most of what was written about it in the first day. This guide separates what Epic has actually said, what nobody has said yet, and what we expect to happen. The last part is our opinion and we label it as such.

The short version

• What it is: a Connector is a link that lets Epic's AI agents ask your app a question or tell it to do something.
• Who uses it: Art (clinicians), Emmie (patients), Penny (billing) and custom agents built in Epic Agent Factory.
• When: hospitals can find Connectors on Epic Showroom from March 2027.
• Control: each hospital reviews what a Connector can read and change before turning it on.
• Protocol: Epic says "industry standards such as MCP servers". MCP is likely but not confirmed as the only option.
• What to do now: list what your product can answer, start read-only, keep your logic on your side, and get your security evidence ready.

Jump to the part for you

• New to this? Read What is Epic Agent Factory and How a Connector call works.
• Already integrated with Epic through FHIR or SMART? Read Connectors next to FHIR, SMART and CDS Hooks.
• Deciding what to build? Read What this means for your product and What to do before March 2027.

Left: today a clinician copies information between Epic and another app by hand. Right: with Connectors, Epic's agent asks each app directly and shows the answer inside Epic, after the hospital has approved what each Connector may read and change.

What is Epic Agent Factory?

Epic Agent Factory is Epic's drag-and-drop builder that lets a health system create its own AI agents inside Epic, without writing code. Epic previewed it at HIMSS in March 2026 and plans wide release in 2027. Epic Connectors are the piece that lets those agents, and Epic's own AI agents, reach apps outside Epic.

Epic AI agents come in four kinds, and each one can use a Connector:

What Epic has confirmed about Epic Connectors

Everything in this section comes from Epic's announcement, its Open@Epic materials, or named Epic staff quoted in the trade press.

A Connector works in two directions. Epic's first example is an ambulance app sending its estimated arrival time into Epic, so the emergency department can get a bed ready before the patient arrives. The second example runs the other way: a hospitalized patient asks Emmie for a meal, and Emmie places the order in the hospital's dietary system. Epic also mentioned wayfinding directions for patients and checking an equipment app to see whether an assistive device is available.

Connectors work with all of Epic's AI agents. Art is the clinician assistant. Epic Emmie talks to patients in MyChart. Penny works on revenue cycle and operations. Custom agents that a health system builds in Agent Factory can use Connectors too.

Before a health system switches a Connector on, it can review what the Connector can do, what information it reads and what it is allowed to change. That review step is the one line in the announcement that should shape how you design yours, and we come back to it below.

Three companies are already building. Availity's CEO Russ Thomas pointed to coverage, prior authorization and claims. Gozio Health's CEO Joshua Titus wants Gozio's wayfinding to feed Emmie so a hospital visit feels smooth from the car park to the pharmacy. Gozio already ships blue-dot wayfinding inside MyChart, so this is an extension of something live rather than a new product. VPL's Derrek Seif described telling patients when their medication will arrive. Johnston Thayer, Epic's vice president of health informatics, gave Healthcare IT News the wayfinding example: Emmie could use a Connector to bring hospital directions to the patient.

Derek De Young, who leads Agent Factory at Epic, described the goal as ending "swivel-chair" work. If you have watched a unit clerk copy an arrival time from one screen into another, you know what he means.

On the protocol, Epic's Open@Epic page says this: in 2027, Agent Factory "will add tools for customers to connect to third-party products and content" through "industry standards such as MCP servers." MCP is the Model Context Protocol, an open standard that lets an AI agent discover and call tools in another system. Epic will also publish a public Epic MCP server for its developer documentation on Open.Epic, so you can ask an AI assistant for an API spec instead of searching the site. Read the wording again: "such as." Epic named MCP as a standard it will support. It has not said every Connector has to be an MCP server.

How a Connector call works, step by step

Epic has not published the technical specification, so this walkthrough uses Epic's own ambulance example and the three facts Epic has stated: the hospital reviews permissions first, the agent asks, and the answer appears inside Epic. Where we fill in a step from how agent tool-calling works elsewhere, we say so.

Read left to right: the hospital approves the Connector once, then every question follows steps 2 to 5 in seconds. Your rules stay in your system; only the answer goes back to Epic.

1. The hospital turns your Connector on. Before that, someone in IT or informatics reads what it can do, what it can read and what it can change, and decides whether to allow it. Epic has confirmed this review. We expect it to be per Connector and per capability, so a hospital could allow "read arrival time" and refuse "cancel transport" (our reading, not Epic's words).
2. A clinician asks Art. In the emergency department, a charge nurse asks "when does the ambulance with the chest pain patient arrive?" In the example Epic gave, the arrival time comes from an ambulance app, and nobody opens that app.
3. Epic's agent calls your app. The agent works out that the question needs your Connector, and sends the request with the context it has: which patient, which transport, which user asked. In MCP terms, Epic would be the client and your app the server exposing a tool called something like get_arrival_time. That naming is ours; Epic has not published tool conventions.
4. Your app answers. It looks up the transport in your own system, applies your own rules, and returns the result. The reasoning stays with you. Only the answer crosses the line.
5. The answer appears inside Epic. The nurse sees "ETA 12 minutes" in the conversation with Art, in the same screen, and starts preparing the bay. If the Connector was a write action instead, such as Emmie ordering a meal, your app would confirm the order and Epic would show that confirmation.

Two things to notice. First, the clinician never saw your product's name, logo or screen. Second, every call passed through Epic, which means Epic can see which questions get asked and how often. Both points shape the advice later in this guide.

If you want to read how agents read and write clinical data today, before Connectors exist, our agent on FHIR guide covers the current pattern.

Where Connectors sit in the Epic AI roadmap

Connectors are the newest piece of a roadmap Epic has been laying out for a year, and they make more sense in that context.

Epic introduced Art, Emmie and Penny at its user group meeting in August 2025. By the August 2026 meeting, Healthcare IT Today reported that Chart with Art was live across 70 specialties, Penny was coding radiology and emergency visits on its own, and Epic counted 129 Art, Emmie and Penny features available with 78 more in development. Ergo, a new clinician screen that pulls from all three agents and from Cosmos, is due in November 2026.

Epic Agent Factory was previewed at HIMSS in March 2026. It is a drag-and-drop builder that lets a health system make its own agents inside Epic. Phil Lindemann, Epic's vice president of data and research, told MedCity News it "allows people to think higher than an app level." Agents built there can draw on the patient's record, the hospital's own protocols and standing orders, and similar past encounters. Wide release is planned for 2027.

Until now, everything an Agent Factory agent could reach lived inside Epic. Connectors are how those agents reach outside. That is why Epic is launching them in the same window as the wider Agent Factory release.

Not everyone thinks hospitals are ready. Adam Farren, CEO of Canvas Medical, praised the approach in the same MedCity piece and then advised starting with narrow agents, because wide workflows carry more "surface area for error." We agree with him, and it affects what we suggest you build first.

Connectors next to FHIR, SMART on FHIR and CDS Hooks

Nothing you have already built becomes obsolete. Epic's existing paths still apply.

The four ways an app works with Epic. The first three exist today. Connectors are new: Epic's agent does the asking, and nobody opens your app.

FHIR APIs read and write structured records. Your code calls Epic. Our Epic FHIR integration guide covers the two auth flows and which resources are free versus gated.

SMART on FHIR launches your app in its own window inside Epic, with the patient and user already selected. A person works in your screen.

CDS Hooks shows your advice as a card at a fixed point in the workflow, such as when an order is signed. The person reads the card and decides. If you have not built one, our CDS Hooks guide for Epic and Oracle walks through the first hook.

A Connector is different in who does the work. Epic's agent asks your app a question or tells it to do something, and the person sees the result inside Epic without opening anything.

In practice we expect the four to coexist in one product. A prior auth vendor might keep a SMART app for the complex cases a human needs to work, answer "is this covered?" through a Connector when Penny asks, and keep using FHIR to read the order underneath.

What Epic AI integration means for your product

The announcement affects different vendors in different ways. Find yourself below.

If you sell to revenue cycle teams

Eligibility, prior auth, claims, denials: Penny is your front door. Availity is already building here, and since August 2026 Epic has had its own instant prior auth requirement checks live at Ochsner, Froedtert ThedaCare, Denver Health and Summit Health, built on the Da Vinci Coverage Requirements Discovery API (Healthcare Dive, 18 August 2026). You will be competing with both a partner and Epic itself for the same question. Your edge is what Epic cannot see: payer-specific rules, your own history of what gets approved, and the ability to submit and track the request. Expose "will this be approved?" and "what is missing?" as Connector answers. Keep the rule engine at home. Our FHIR prior authorization guide covers the Da Vinci standards Penny will probably sit on top of.

If you sell a patient-facing app

Wayfinding, transport, meal ordering, education, remote monitoring: Emmie is your front door, and Emmie lives in MyChart, which the patient already has. Gozio and VPL are both here. The risk is that patients stop opening your app. The opportunity is that every MyChart user becomes a potential user of your service without a download. Design for the Connector first and the app second. The hospital's review will be lighter for you than for clinical vendors, because the actions are low risk.

If you sell operations or logistics software

Bed management, transport, equipment, staffing, pharmacy delivery: Epic's own examples are mostly yours. The ambulance ETA, the assistive device check, the medication arrival time. These are the first Connectors hospitals will switch on because a wrong answer causes an inconvenience, not harm. If you are in this group, be ready for March 2027. Being early on Showroom matters more here than anywhere else.

If you sell clinical decision support

Risk scores, drug interaction, imaging AI, guidelines: Art is your front door, and this is the hardest case. A clinician asking Art "what is this patient's sepsis risk?" and getting your score inline is excellent adoption. It is also the case a CMIO will review most carefully, and the one where Epic has the strongest incentive to build its own answer from Cosmos. Read-only answers, with your evidence attached, are the only sensible first step. Expect your Connector review to take as long as a full app approval, and plan for it.

If you are a health system building in Agent Factory

Connectors are how your agents get to the systems outside Epic that your staff use every day. Ask your vendors now whether they plan a Connector, and in which quarter. If a vendor does not have an answer by early 2027, that tells you something.

What is not public yet

As of 22 October 2026, Epic has not published:

• how a developer builds and tests a Connector
• how your app and Epic authenticate to each other
• what it costs to list one
• whether you still need a sponsoring Epic customer, which today you do for most clinical integrations (see how to integrate with Epic and our Showroom approval guide)
• whether a Connection Hub listing is a prerequisite
• which Connectors will be available on day one

Becker's noted that Epic did not say which Connectors would be live at launch or share results from any health system using one. Some commentary pieces have filled these gaps with specifics about JSON-RPC payloads, permission manifests and listing fees. We could not trace any of it to Epic, so it is not in this guide. We will update this post when Epic publishes developer documentation.

What we think will happen

This section is our prediction. Epic has not said any of this. We base it on Epic's own wording, on how Connection Hub and Showroom have worked for the last few years, and on how agent platforms outside healthcare have developed. We will come back and mark each one right or wrong.

MCP will be the main way to build a Connector. Epic named it, and it is already the common standard for agent tools everywhere else. We expect most developers will build an MCP server and Epic will act as the client. What would change our mind: Epic documentation showing a separate Epic-only format with MCP as a secondary option.

The hospital review will be stricter than today's app approval. Right now a health system mostly reviews what your app can read. A Connector can change things on a patient's or clinician's behalf, and that is a different conversation with a CMIO and a security team. We expect them to ask for a list of every action your Connector exposes, who can trigger each one, and a log of every call. The evidence list in our vendor security review guide is still the starting point, and we expect an "actions" section to be added to it.

Early adoption will favour low-risk, already-approved vendors. Every Connector needs a review before it goes live, and health systems have limited review capacity. The first Connectors switched on will be from vendors the hospital already trusts, doing things that cannot hurt anyone if they go wrong: directions, arrival times, delivery status, scheduling. Clinical actions come later.

Your screen will matter less, and your answer will matter more. If a clinician asks Art and gets your result inline, they may never open your dashboard again. That is good for adoption and bad for anyone whose differentiation is the interface. The products that win will return something only they can provide: data Epic does not have, a model Epic has not built, or an action in a system Epic cannot reach.

Epic will learn which capabilities people rely on. Every request goes through Epic's agent, so Epic will see which Connector actions get called most. We do not think that is sinister; every platform owner sees this. But it changes what you should expose. Put the thin answer in the Connector. Keep the reasoning, the model and the rules on your side.

What to do before March 2027

You have about five months. These steps hold whatever the final technical details turn out to be.

Use this as a to-do list for your team. Steps 1 to 4 are product work, step 5 is security, step 6 is sales, step 7 is a small engineering test.

1. Write down every question your product can answer and every action it can take. For each one, note what data it reads, what it changes and who should be allowed to trigger it. This list becomes your Connector's permissions, and it is what a hospital will review.
2. Separate read from write. Start with read-only answers; they are far easier to get approved. Add actions that change data once a customer trusts the first version.
3. Keep your core logic at home. The Connector exposes a result. The scoring, the model and the rules stay in your system.
4. Log every call: who asked, what was asked, what you returned, what changed. Hospitals will ask for this, and you will want it the first time an agent does something unexpected.
5. Get your security evidence ready now. SOC 2 Type II, a signed BAA and a clean list of subprocessors are the first three questions every Epic customer asks, and the subprocessor reconciliation is the step that stalls most vendors.
6. Ask your Epic customers whether they plan to use Agent Factory or Connectors in 2027, and which of your workflows they would want first. One sponsoring customer is still the fastest route into Epic, and that is unlikely to change.
7. Build a small MCP server that exposes one read-only answer from your product. It costs a few days, it teaches your team the model, and it is useful even if Epic's final format differs.

If you want to plan the timeline, our Epic integration timeline guide shows how long each phase takes today. Expect the review phase to be longer for a Connector than for a read-only FHIR app.

Questions to put to Epic and to your customers

Take these into your next Epic vendor call or customer review. The answers will tell you how fast to move.

To Epic (through your Vendor Services contact or at Open@Epic): Will Connectors require a Connection Hub listing? Will there be a sandbox before March 2027? Is MCP the only supported transport, or one of several? What does the hospital see in the permission review screen? Is there a listing fee?

To your hospital customers: Who owns Agent Factory in your organisation? Have you built or piloted an agent yet? Which outside systems do your staff still swivel to? Would you switch on a read-only Connector from us in the first quarter it is available?

If you want a second pair of eyes on which of your capabilities to expose first, and how to get through the hospital review, our healthcare interoperability team has taken vendors through Epic's app approval and security review, and our healthcare AI agents team builds the agent side. Talk to our team about a Connector readiness review.

Sources

• Epic, Introducing Connectors: A New Way for Apps to Communicate With Epic, 21 October 2026
• Open@Epic conference page
• Healthcare IT News, Epic enables EHRs to communicate with other apps, 21 October 2026
• Becker's Hospital Review, Epic takes aim at swivel-chair work with AI Connectors, 21 October 2026
• MedCity News, Epic Is Letting Health Systems Build Their Own Agents, March 2026
• Healthcare IT Today, Epic UGM 2026, 19 August 2026
• Healthcare Dive, Epic debuts instant prior authorization checks at 4 health systems, 18 August 2026
• Gozio Health, Gozio Brings Blue-Dot Wayfinding to MyChart, 27 January 2026