Roupen Odabashian, Oncologist at Abbotsford Regional Hospital and Cancer Centre, shared on X:
”OpenAI connected ChatGPT to Epic today. Read-only. It can pull notes, labs, meds and specialist documentation, and it cannot write a single character back into the chart.
That constraint is correct and it is also the ceiling. Summarizing a chart was never the hard part of my day. I can skim a chart.
What I cannot do in a fifteen minute visit is hold this patient’s histology, line of therapy, and organ function against the eligibility criteria of forty open trials, then check whether the drug I want is covered.
Which is why the quieter half of the announcement is the more interesting one. Alongside Epic they shipped a plugin into nine public sources: ClinicalTrials.gov, CMS Coverage, RxNorm, DailyMed, PubMed.
Chart plus eligibility plus coverage, in one place, is a genuinely different tool than a summarizer. It is the cross reference that never happens because no one has forty minutes per patient to do it by hand.
UCSF is the pilot. Epic sits on records for more than 325 million patients, so whatever this becomes, it becomes it at scale.
The open question for me is whether read-only survives contact with clinical demand, or whether it is a staging post.”
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