16 AI features already in your EHR, and how to use them

The newest AI tool in your practice may have arrived without a sales call. In August, athenahealth made its ambient scribe and other AI features generally available to more than 170,000 clinicians, built into the core EHR at no added subscription cost rather than sold as an add-on. Epic said in March that more than 85 percent of its customers are already using Epic AI.

Physicians are moving just as fast. The AMA's 2026 Physician Survey on Augmented Intelligence found 81 percent of physicians now use AI professionally, more than double the share in 2023. Comfort is lowest where staffing is thinnest, though. In athenahealth's 2026 Physician Sentiment Survey of 1,045 physicians, 43 percent of clinicians in practices with one to five clinicians said they were comfortable with AI, compared with 65 percent in enterprise organizations.

When AI shows up in a routine release, nobody runs a procurement process, and the questions that usually come with one get skipped. Who checks the output? Who decides what is on by default? What happens when it's wrong? Some of these features can give physicians real time back. Others add risk to every note and every claim. Here are 16 to sort out now.