What Epic Announced About Its Agent Factory Build-a-Thon

Epic said on September 15, 2026 that 25 health systems are taking part in the second Agent Factory Build-a-Thon, where their own staff build AI agents inside Epic instead of waiting for a released feature. Epic says the first Build-a-Thon was held in May 2026, training for early adopters begins in October 2026, and broader availability is planned for 2027. Epic describes agents built to spot a serious bowel illness in newborns called necrotizing enterocolitis, flag which surgeries are likely to be cancelled, review medication refill requests, and record critical care time. Epic says the ECU Health agent saves 20 hours of staff time each week, and names Derek DeYoung as the person leading Agent Factory development.

Why the Epic Agent Factory Matters to Health Systems That Want to Build Their Own AI

Letting a health system build its own agent moves both the work and the responsibility inside the hospital. That is appealing to a system with informatics staff and a problem Epic will never build a feature for, and risky for a system without them, because somebody local now owns how the agent behaves on a bad day. The 20 hours a week is the ECU Health count for one agent, so read it as an example and not a benchmark. The open question is governance: who signs off that a home-built agent is safe to leave running, and who notices when it starts drifting.

Where the Epic Update Comes From

Epic is the original record behind this update. It tells us what the company published. This brief adds the market context and the method we would use to test the development against other evidence.

Epic original source.

How We Would Research the Epic Agent Factory and the ECU Health Agent

The source gives us the starting point. This is how we would build the next layer of research around it.

  1. We would start by asking Epic what review a locally built agent must pass before it runs on live patient data.
  2. Then we would ask ECU Health which task its agent handles and how the 20 hours a week was counted.
  3. We would find out what happens to a home-built agent when Epic later ships its own version of the same job.