Open@Epic, held on 21st–22nd October, came with much-awaited announcements. The most impactful of all is “
Connectors”-: the ability for Epic’s AI agents to pull data from, and even complete tasks within, third-party systems directly. Epic was already on the path to embracing AI, and in 2025 it had come up with Art, Penny and Emmie as its AI agents, each focussing on one set of users: clinical workers, revenue cycle workers and patients. Connectors will give these agents superpowers by letting them
tap into third-party products while still working from within Epic itself.
In a world where people are looking for consolidated experiences,
not having to log in to ONE MORE system will be a big plus for the adoption of any product/service. What then happens to the revenue cycle product your team has been working on?
What then happens to your Revenue Cycle Product?
Today, revenue cycle vendors pull from Epic. They launch through SMART, read FHIR data, take X12 feeds, sometimes run reporting extracts or screen-scraping bots, and then push results back through workqueues or a separate portal. Their product is a destination that staff switch to.
With Connectors,
Epic’s agent calls the vendor. Penny becomes the orchestrator and the vendor’s product becomes a tool Penny reaches for. Epic says it will initially use the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as the standard for building Connectors.
From being a final destination for staff to being one of the tools Penny reaches for is a radical shift. So what changes for your existing revenue cycle product?
- Products break into verbs. An appeals product stops being an app and becomes a set of callable actions: assess whether a denial is worth fighting, draft the appeal, assemble the packet, submit it. Hospitals may adopt one action without buying the suite. So which of your capabilities can stand independently as a call?
- Your interface becomes optional. If a biller asks Penny “why was this denied, and can we win it?” and the answer comes from your Connector, the biller never opens your dashboard. Your brand weakens, and the value moves entirely into the quality of the answer. The biller may never even know the name of your product.
- Pricing follows the call. Seat licences make little sense when the “user” is an agent. Pricing will likely move to per-call, per-outcome or per-recovered-dollar. Vendors who already price on outcomes have a head start.
There is a catch, though. Penny already drafts appeal letters, and Epic has said it plans for Penny to submit straightforward appeals on its own, within guardrails each organisation sets.
So a Connector can be a channel or an audition. If your product only does what Penny can learn to do, it risks being absorbed. What keeps you in the loop is what you bring that Penny doesn’t have: proprietary data, payer intelligence or human expertise that Epic can’t see.
Developer Connectors are expected to be listed on the Epic Showroom from March 2027, with testing at select health systems by the end of 2026, and some vendors are already building. There is no public developer spec yet, so if you want a head start:
- Think through the three points above and refactor accordingly.
- Build a small read-only MCP server that wraps your product’s functions. Since Epic hasn’t published its Connector spec yet, expect to adjust it once the spec is out.
- Have SOC 2 evidence, a BAA (HIPAA business associate agreement) and a list of subprocessors ready.
Read-only is the right place to start. Health systems will review what every Connector can read and change before switching it on, and a read-only Connector is the easiest one to say yes to.
Cennest has more than a decade's experience working with RCM systems and Epic and Cerner integrations using SMART on FHIR.Reach out if you would like to talk about your strategy or need help with implementation.
Team Cennest
