When Epic announced Connectors at Open@Epic in October, most of the coverage focused on the next twelve months. It’s a change in the right direction, one that empowers the EHR user: Epic’s AI agents (Art for clinicians, Penny for revenue cycle and Emmie for patients) will be able to call third-party products directly, with Connectors listed on the Epic Showroom from March 2027. That alone could
reshape product roadmaps almost immediately.
This post is not about that. It’s a slightly creative but plausible speculation on how things might unfold over the next two years: what it would take to stay within safe boundaries, and which signals to watch if you don’t want to be blindsided.
Possibility 1: Penny becomes a broker, and vendors compete task by task
Say five vendors publish a Connector that can draft an appeal. When a biller asks Penny to appeal a denial, which one does Penny call? How is that routing configured, and who configures it? Billers will ask for a task, not a brand, so being found becomes the hardest problem for vendors. And because Epic will charge developers to list Connectors on the Showroom, a vendor could end up paying for a place on a shelf that Penny rarely picks from.
The guardrail
Routing has to be visible to the hospital and under its control. If a hospital can’t see why Penny chose one vendor over another, or can’t override it, buying decisions end up being made by logic nobody signed off on. Vendors, too, need to see how often they are called and why, so they can course-correct.
Signal to watch
Whether Epic publishes rules for how Penny chooses between Connectors that do the same job.
Possibility 2: A revenue cycle pipeline across vendors, conducted by Epic
Epic has said its agents can use several Connectors to complete one multi-step workflow. Take that a step further. Eligibility from one vendor, prior authorization from another, coding from a third, claim scrubbing from a clearinghouse, then denial prediction and appeals. Penny stitches them into one flow. The hospital stops buying a revenue cycle suite and starts assembling one, picking the best of each.
Two issues have to be resolved. The first is context sharing: the eligibility result has to travel with the claim, and someone has to decide what each vendor in the chain gets to see. The second is accountability: when a chain of four vendors’ tools produces a wrong claim, who owns the error?
The guardrail
Every step needs a traceable record: which Connector was called, what it was given and what it returned. Each vendor should see only the data its own step needs. Without both, no compliance team will approve a multi-vendor flow and no one can settle a dispute. Contracts will also need to cover errors at the handoffs, not just inside each product.
Signal to watch
Whether Epic offers a shared audit trail across Connector calls.
Possibility 3: People behind the tool
This one sounds the most far-fetched, but it is the easiest to build today. Not every Connector has to be software alone. A vendor with a team of physician advisors could expose “get a physician review of this case” as a Connector. Penny calls it, and a person fulfills it under a service-level agreement. Managed services become something Penny can call, and expert human judgment, delivered on a deadline, is hard for Penny to absorb.
The guardrail
The hospital needs to know when a person, not software, is behind an answer, along with that person’s credentials and a record of the review. SLAs need clear turnaround limits, and a fallback for when a review misses its deadline.
Signal to watch
Whether any services-led vendor lists a people-fulfilled Connector when the Showroom opens.
What this means today
None of this is certain. Epic hasn’t published its Connector spec, and the Showroom doesn’t open until March 2027. But the choices vendors make in the next six months will decide which of these futures they are ready for.
Any product working with Epic today should be architected with these possibilities in mind: intelligent logging, competitive modular pricing and clearly defined useful standalone actions that Penny can call.
At Cennest, we combine more than a decade of revenue cycle and Epic integration experience with hands-on work on MCP servers and agent testing. We help vendors turn their products into callable, traceable, well-governed actions. If you’re preparing for a world where Penny is the one calling your product, let’s talk.
Team Cennest
