This is a preview of the October 29 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox on Thursdays. Last week, I traveled to Nashville for eClinicalWorks' National Conference, where the EHR vendor laid out an ambitious vision for the future of health care technology: fewer clicks, more automation and AI that even the smallest medical practices can afford. The company, which expects to surpass $1.3 billion in revenue this year, announced a sweeping redesign of its EHR alongside new AI agents, clinical decision-support tools and two business units that will take it further into inpatient care and pharmacy operations.
I sat down with cofounder and CEO Girish Navani to discuss the announcements and what they mean for the 180,000-plus providers that use eClinicalWorks. A few takeaways stood out. First, eClinicalWorks wants to fundamentally change how clinicians interact with their EHRs.
Its upcoming 12.04 release introduces Canvas for Care, a redesigned workspace that brings patient information, AI-generated summaries and recommended actions together. Navani predicts customers could see a 30 percent improvement in efficiency within about a quarter of upgrading, though that figure remains a company projection. Second, the company is giving customers the tools to build their own AI agents.
At a hands-on demonstration, I watched attendees experiment with the new AI Workbench, which allows organizations to create automated workflows for everything from referrals to revenue cycle management. Varun Navani, a project lead on the Workbench, told me that attendees were particularly interested in how agents would integrate with their existing systems and whether they could be trusted to operate reliably. I attended a demo session where excitement ran so high (and questions were so prevalent) that organizers had to rein in side conversations several times before we reached the finished product: an AI agent capable of sorting emails by urgency and flagging those requiring immediate follow-up.
"Give me 20 minutes and I would have 100 ideas for how to use it," one user said of the agent-builder while leaving the demo. The platform includes an evaluation suite that tests agents against defined criteria before deployment, along with mechanisms to alert staff when technical failures require human intervention. Those safeguards will become increasingly important as organizations give AI greater responsibility for operational tasks.
Third, eClinicalWorks is expanding beyond its traditional ambulatory market. Its new inpatient EHR is aimed particularly at community and critical access hospitals, with four early hospital customers preparing to implement the system. A new pharmacy platform, meanwhile, connects prescribing, inventory management and pharmacy operations with patient records.
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