STAT+: How health systems are embracing chatbots to query and summarize patient records

Stanford Medicine's ChatEHR, a large language model-powered tool, helped solve a challenging cancer diagnosis by uncovering a patient's prior sarcomatoid squamous cell carcinoma diagnosis from another health system, demonstrating the value of AI chatbots for querying and summarizing electronic health records. Health systems including Stanford and Penn are moving toward broad implementation of such chatbots, both homegrown and vendor-built, to help clinicians navigate bloated medical records.

The pathologists were stumped. Six people had tried to identify a patient’s cancer based on a recent lymph node biopsy. They’d stained the cells 70 times to try to draw out more distinguishing features — but still, nobody had an answer. At Stanford, a physician called onto the case was trying out a new tool called ChatEHR, one of several large language model-powered tools being deployed by health systems to summarize patients’ often-extensive medical records. It got a question: Did the patient have any history of skin lesions? After some back-and-forth, from the depths of the patient’s history, ChatEHR delivered an answer: In a different health system, the patient had previously been diagnosed with sarcomatoid squamous cell carcinoma. It “completely explained the findings in the lymph node,” wrote the happy doctor in their feedback for the chatbot. “If that doesn’t prove the value of ChatEHR, I don’t know what does ” This was the kind of needle in a haystack doctors hoped to find when health systems first started experimenting with generative AI tools like ChatEHR to search and synthesize patients’ health records. Clinicians often struggle to find the information they need to care for patients, because modern electronic health records have gotten so bloated. Today, a number of health systems are moving toward broad implementation of chatbots for EHRs https://www.statnews.com/2026/01/28/stanford-penn-hospitals-build-electronic-health-record-chatbots/ , both homegrown and vendor-built. And it turns out that solving diagnostic mysteries is the least of their selling points. This article is exclusive to STAT+ subscribers Unlock this article — and get additional analysis of the technologies disrupting health care — by subscribing to STAT+. Already have an account? Log in /login/ View All Plans https://www.statnews.com/stat-plus/