Epic partnerships give native workflow advantage
Brendan Keeler, interoperability lead at HTD Health, on GTM for AI medical scribes
Epic development status is less about a logo on a partner page and more about who gets built into clinician workflow first. In practice, that means Abridge and Nuance can ship closer to the chart, the order screen, and specialty specific workflows inside Epic, which gives them a real advantage in enterprise sales because hospitals prefer tools that feel native, need less IT work, and create fewer documentation errors.
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Abridge used this position to move beyond a generic note taker into deeper Epic specific products. It launched as Epic’s first Pal in August 2023, then expanded into co developed nursing workflows with Epic and Mayo Clinic, showing the relationship is about joint product building, not just a marketplace listing.
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Nuance has the other major lane into Epic. Epic and Nuance expanded DAX Express for Epic in 2023 as part of a broader Microsoft, Nuance, and Epic collaboration, which keeps Nuance strong with large health systems already standardized on Dragon and Microsoft contracts.
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This is why smaller scribes tend to specialize by specialty, care setting, or non Epic EHRs instead of attacking Epic head on. Abridge grew from about 8,000 to more than 60,000 clinicians across 100 plus health systems after its Epic and Athenahealth partnerships, while tools like Freed and Suki compete through lighter weight adoption paths rather than the same level of embedded Epic development access.
The next step is that the winners inside major EHRs will expand from note writing into coding, prior auth, and other workflow steps that start from the clinical conversation. The company with the deepest EHR level integration will have the easiest path to become the default operating layer for ambient AI across large health systems.