Epic Cheers is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool built specifically for healthcare organizations that use Epic’s electronic health record system. It functions as the communication and patient engagement layer of Epic’s software suite, giving call center staff, marketers, and clinic teams a way to manage patient interactions across scheduling, billing, provider searches, and outreach campaigns.
How Cheers Works
At its core, Cheers is designed to make every patient interaction more informed. When someone calls a clinic or health system call center, the Cheers Call Management module pulls up that caller’s past interactions with the organization. Staff can see previous appointments, billing history, and communication preferences in one place, so the conversation starts from context rather than scratch. Topics range from scheduling a new appointment to answering a billing question to helping a patient find a provider who is accepting new patients.
Cheers also includes routing tools that direct patient communications to the correct department or clinician. Managers can track whether patients are getting timely responses and whether issues are being closed with appropriate follow-up. A built-in Provider Finder feature lets staff search for providers by location, specialty, and availability, which is especially useful when a patient needs to change their primary care physician or find someone new.
Why Integration With the Health Record Matters
The defining feature of Cheers is that it lives inside the same system where clinical, billing, and administrative data already exist. Most healthcare organizations that use a standalone CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot) end up with patient information siloed in one system and marketing or outreach data in another. Cheers eliminates that gap. When a marketing campaign collects new information about a patient, that data flows directly into the broader Epic record and becomes available to clinicians, billing staff, and schedulers.
Epic runs on a single unified code base across all its applications. In practical terms, this means that if a patient’s preferred language is captured during a phone call, that preference automatically carries over to appointment reminders, portal messages, and any other touchpoint. A standalone CRM would require custom integrations to achieve the same thing, and those integrations often break or lag behind. Healthcare industry observers note that deeply integrated CRM platforms like Cheers are quickly becoming the expected standard rather than a differentiator.
AI Tools in the Ecosystem
Epic has been layering artificial intelligence into its broader platform, and some of those tools intersect with the kind of work Cheers supports. A digital concierge called “Emmie” sits inside Epic’s MyChart patient portal and engages patients before appointments, helping them prepare and answering questions about test results. Emmie can also work with a clinical assistant tool called “Art” to handle outreach tasks on behalf of providers, like identifying patients who are missing lab work, scheduling those tasks, and creating plain-language summaries.
On the provider side, Epic’s generative AI can draft responses to patient messages that clinicians then review, edit, and approve before sending. These capabilities don’t all sit inside the Cheers module specifically, but they feed into the same goal: making patient communication faster and more personalized without adding work for staff.
Who Uses Cheers
Cheers is built for health systems and hospitals already running Epic’s electronic health record. Within those organizations, the primary users fall into a few groups. Call center agents use it daily to handle inbound patient calls with full context. Healthcare marketers use it to run outreach campaigns, like reminders for preventive screenings or notifications about new services, that pull from real clinical data rather than generic mailing lists. Clinic managers use the tracking and routing tools to make sure nothing falls through the cracks when patients reach out with questions or concerns.
Because Cheers requires an existing Epic environment, it is not available as a standalone product. Organizations that don’t use Epic for their health records would need to look at third-party CRM solutions instead. For those already on the Epic platform, Cheers offers the advantage of zero integration overhead: everything shares the same database, the same patient record, and the same infrastructure.