Comparison

Pelica vs Epic Healthy Planet: the chart and the work are different jobs.

~17 min readBy Pelica Health teamPublished August 12, 2026Updated August 12, 2026Reviewed by Catherine Zhao

Short answer

Epic is the clinical system of record plus separately licensed modules on one platform: Healthy Planet for population health, Compass Rose for care management, Cheers for CRM, Payer Platform for payer data exchange, Cogito for analytics. Configured together, they cover a lot, for the practices that live in Epic, at the pace of whoever owns the build queue. Pelica is an operating layer for the work between visits: payer files from every contract, outbound calls, cross-network worklists, provider follow-up, on every EHR, under the risk-bearing team's own control. Keep Epic where it is strong. The open question is who runs the work around it.

"We have Epic" is the start of the question

Almost every conversation about this comparison begins the same way. Someone says the network already has Epic, or is moving to it, so population health should come with it. It is a reasonable starting point. Epic holds 43.7% of US acute-care hospitals and 56.9% of beds per KLAS's May 2026 market share report, and buying from the platform you already own is the rational default.

The sentence hides a licensing structure, though. Epic is a core EHR plus modules that are licensed, built, and staffed separately. Having Epic in the exam room does not mean the organization has licensed Healthy Planet, built Compass Rose programs, stood up Cheers campaigns, or signed payers onto Payer Platform. Each of those is its own decision, its own build, and in most cases its own certified analysts. So before any feature comparison means anything, decode the stack.

Epic component	What it is	How it is acquired
Healthy Planet	Population health: registries, care gaps, risk stratification, contract analytics, ACO reporting. Epic's population health page describes the portfolio.	Module license plus local build.
Compass Rose	Care management: programs, tasks, outreach calls, assessments, work queues. Epic publishes little about it; the clearest public descriptions come from a UC Davis Health implementation study and Epic's Social Safety Net page.	Module license plus build.
Cheers	CRM: outreach campaigns, call-center context, bulk patient messaging. Epic's Cheers page.	Additional product line, unveiled at HIMSS in March 2022.
Payer Platform	Payer-provider exchange: claims, diagnoses, care gaps, prior auth, described on Epic's payers page. Each payer connection is stood up separately; see Aetna's own onboarding page for what one looks like.	License, and each payer must participate, plan by plan.
Cogito / Caboodle	Analytics platform and data warehouse: SlicerDicer, Reporting Workbench, Radar dashboards, described in UC Davis Health's Cogito overview.	Largely included; needs certified analysts and warehouse build.
EpicCare Link	Browser access for outside and community providers, typically chart review and limited workflows. Brown University Health describes its version: read access plus referrals, granted practice by practice.	Usually included; provisioned practice by practice.
MyChart, Art, Emmie, Penny, Agent Factory	Patient portal, then Epic's AI line: Art for clinicians (AI charting went generally available in February 2026), Emmie for patients in MyChart, Penny for revenue cycle, and Agent Factory, a no-code agent builder previewed at HIMSS in March 2026.	MyChart standard; the AI line is rolling out across Epic customers.

That is how enterprise platforms work, and Epic's own documentation is clear about it. But it means "Epic vs Pelica" is rarely one comparison. It is a different comparison for each kind of buyer, depending on which modules are licensed, what is actually built, and who controls the queue.

Four buyers, four different questions

We meet this evaluation in four shapes. The honest answer differs across them, so it is worth finding yours before reading a feature table.

You own your Epic instance

A health system medical group or employed network, fully on Epic, with its own analysts and its own governance. If leadership will license the modules and prioritize the build, the Epic stack is the default answer, and often the right one.

The real question: how many analyst-years sit between today and the workflows your quality and pharmacy teams need, and what happens in the measurement years in between.

Your Epic comes through a health system

An IPA, MSO, or affiliated group whose practices run Epic through a health system's instance. Module licensing, build priority, campaign changes, and report requests are decided upstream, by the instance owner's governance, not by your team.

What to ask: who steers the instance, and how long your requests wait behind the host's own.

Your network is mixed

An ACO, CIN, or MSO where some practices run Epic and the rest run eClinicalWorks, Medent, Allscripts, athena, or paper. Epic's population health tools are strongest for the Epic subset; EpicCare Link gives outside practices access to the host's records, not an operating queue of work.

What decides it: what runs the whole attributed panel. You are paid on all of it.

You hold delegated risk across many payers

A risk-bearing group with five to ten payer contracts, each with its own files, portal, formats, and calendar. Most of the daily work arrives as payer files and leaves as phone calls, portal entries, and supplemental data, outside any single chart.

The real question: where the between-visit work actually lives, and whether a chart-centered stack is the right tool for it.

Twenty-one dimensions, module by module

The comparison below names the responsible Epic module in every row, credits it per Epic's public documentation, and says plainly when we could not find something published. Where a row says "no published equivalent," that means we looked at Epic's public materials and did not find one as of August 12, 2026, not that the capability is impossible to build.

Core Epic strength mature, documented, no reason to look elsewhere

Module + build achievable with the named license, feeds, analysts, and queue time

No published equivalent nothing found in Epic's public documentation as of August 12, 2026

Every Pelica cell describes capability in production with at least one customer today.

Data and intelligence

Dimension	Epic stack	Pelica
Payer file intake	Module + build Payer Platform exchanges claims, diagnoses, and care gaps with payers that sign on, plan by plan. Other feeds are interface projects built from open.epic specs by the organization's analysts. A payer format change goes back to the analysts who built the interface.	Agents fetch files from payer portals with credentials, alongside SFTP, API, and data lake feeds, in any format. Schema mapping repairs payer format drift automatically.
Clinical data depth	Core Epic strength For practices inside the instance, labs, vitals, notes, and orders are native and complete. Nothing assembled from feeds matches the chart for an Epic practice.	Pelica reads what the feeds carry: claims, pharmacy, ADT, lab, and EHR extracts. Deeper than a payer file, shallower than the chart.
Network coverage	Module + build Strong for practices inside the Epic instance. EpicCare Link extends chart access to outside practices, provisioned one by one; Care Everywhere exchanges documents. Neither is documented as an operating work queue for practices outside the instance.	One queue across the whole attributed panel: Epic practices, eClinicalWorks, Medent, Allscripts, paper. Coverage follows the membership file.
Prioritizing members	Module + build Registries, rules, and clinically oriented risk models, built by analysts, are real and documented on Epic's population health page. Contract-opportunity analytics exist at the population level.	Per-measure operational scoring: refill windows, last-impactable dates, reachability, whether the PCP is the prescriber, contract value, distance to cut points. Rescored as each new file lands.
Work assignment	Module + build Compass Rose provides work queues and task routing for users inside Epic.	Assignment by role, license, language, workload, availability, and which EHRs each person can access. People and AI agents draw from the same queue.
Self-service analytics	Module + build SlicerDicer and Radar answer questions inside prebuilt data models. Custom questions route to Cogito-certified analysts and the report queue.	An AI analyst turns a plain-English question into a query over the live operational and claims record and returns the answer with the underlying data. No cube to rebuild, no ticket to file.
Evidence back to payers	Core Epic strength ACO and MSSP quality submission is documented and mature. Per-payer supplemental data formats beyond that are local build.	One-click exports in each payer's own format, with closure tracked through to acceptance in the payer's next file.

Execution and engagement

Dimension	Epic stack	Pelica
Point-of-care closure	Core Epic strength Best Practice Advisories and Health Maintenance surface open gaps to the clinician during the visit, in the native workflow. This is the highest-yield moment to close a gap and Epic owns it.	Pelica writes closed gaps and outreach results back into the chart. No in-visit decision support, by design.
Patient portal engagement	Core Epic strength MyChart is the portal of record across Epic's installed base, and Emmie now answers patient questions inside it.	Phone and SMS to members who have no portal relationship, which in a delegated panel is most of them. Pelica is not a patient portal.
Outbound calls and SMS	No published equivalent Cheers sends campaigns tied to EHR eligibility, and Emmie is live in MyChart with two-way text messaging rolling out. We did not find published documentation of autonomous outbound phone agents that call members, pharmacies, or prescriber offices.	Voice agents call members, pharmacy IVR lines for live fill status, prescriber offices, and front desks; retry, schedule callbacks, book during the call, and warm-escalate with the attempt history attached. Multilingual SMS with no-answer fallbacks.
Documenting outreach	No published equivalent Coordinator calls are typed into Compass Rose. Epic's ambient AI documentation targets clinical visits, per its February 2026 AI charting post, which is a different job.	Every outreach call is transcribed and extracted into who was reached, what happened, and the next step, filed in one click, for human and AI calls alike.
Next best action	No published equivalent BPAs and Health Maintenance guide the clinician during the visit, and do that well. We did not find case-level guidance for coordinators between visits, or batching across cases.	A synthesized next action per case from full history, claims, discharges, and live refill state, with same-pharmacy, same-practice, and same-household batching.
Campaigns and surges	Module + build Cheers runs campaigns from registry criteria. Standing a new one up is an analyst build that goes through governance.	Change the cohort or the weighting and it is live the same day. When a measure is within reach of a threshold, a surge pushes the remaining cases to the top.
Kits and devices	Module + build Clinicians order screening kits or remote blood pressure monitoring at the visit. We did not find a documented cross-network kit program workflow.	Kit programs run as workflows: opt-in, ordering, shipping, member follow-up, and return-and-result tracked through to gap closure.
Call QA and coaching	No published equivalent We did not find call recording or QA scoring in the public care management stack.	Recording, transcript, QA scoring, and coaching evidence on every call, human or AI.

Provider network and operations

Dimension	Epic stack	Pelica
Provider experience	Module + build EpicCare Link gives outside practices chart access through the host's instance, provisioned practice by practice, and it shows that instance's data.	A white-label, NPI-scoped portal for any EHR: cross-payer scorecards, patients ranked by dollars at stake, chase lists, printable and faxable snapshots, and a live agenda for field reps.
Provider incentives	No published equivalent We did not find gap-level incentive economics for network providers in Epic's public materials.	Custom incentive programs per network: gap pay ladders, surge additions, AWV and post-discharge bonuses, an earnings ledger with an audit trail, and payment status.
Coding review	Module + build Point-of-care HCC capture and payer suspecting exist inside Epic. Coder review queues spanning a mixed-EHR network are local build.	Prospective and retrospective coder workflows: chart and claim validation, encounter tracking, review queues, and feedback to practices, across every EHR.
Issue tracking	No published equivalent We did not find a cross-payer registry for roster, attribution, and eligibility exceptions. Billing work queues are the nearest analog, in a different domain.	"Not my member," roster errors, and term or credentialing issues get flagged from the case, routed to an owned queue, assigned, exported, and reported.
Implementation	Module + build Per module: license, certified analysts, then build. Public examples below run from weeks per cohort application at Mayo to an 18-month registry collaboration, plus permanent analyst staffing.	First workflow live in about two weeks. A full integration scope runs about three months. Support is embedded; there are no analyst hires.
Who controls change	Module + build The instance owner's governance and build queue. For affiliated groups, priorities and campaigns change at the platform owner's pace.	The risk-bearing team's own rules, changed by the team that owns the result.

A note on fairness. "No published equivalent" is a statement about Epic's public documentation on the date we checked, and Epic ships new capability constantly. If Epic publishes any of these workflows, this page will be corrected the way we corrected our own Navina vs Reveleer page when Reveleer's prospective story changed.

Where Epic is the better answer

A comparison that never concedes anything is marketing. These are real, and none of them are close.

Point-of-care closure inside Epic practices. BPAs and Health Maintenance in the visit, in the clinician's native workflow, are best in class. Pelica writes into that workflow; it does not compete with it.
Clinical data depth. For Epic practices, labs, vitals, and notes inside the chart run deeper than anything a payer file carries.
Patient engagement at portal scale. Epic says more than 325 million patients have a current record in Epic, and MyChart is the portal attached to it. No startup should pretend to match that surface.
ACO and MSSP quality submission. Documented, mature, widely used.
Independent recognition. Epic won 2025 Best in KLAS for population health management. That is the category Healthy Planet plays in, and it should carry weight in any evaluation.
Enterprise governance and security. Epic runs the record for 43.7% of US acute-care hospitals. That operational track record is real, and it is not a small thing to walk away from.
The AI investment. Art's AI charting went generally available in February 2026 with more than 200 organizations live, Emmie answers patients inside MyChart, and Agent Factory, previewed at HIMSS in March 2026, is built to make agents configurable. Anyone betting against Epic's AI roadmap is making a mistake.

If your network is fully Epic, your organization owns its instance, and leadership will fund the modules and prioritize the build, using what you own is sound advice. The rest of this page is about what "the build" means and who waits on it.

What "with modules and build" costs, in public numbers

There is no public list price for Healthy Planet and no standard implementation timeline, so any single figure would mislead. What exists in public records are scoped, dated, local data points. We present them as exactly that, not as quotes.

UMMC described an 18-month collaboration with Hattiesburg Clinic that included training and 44 chronic-disease registries.
Mayo Clinic's internal Healthy Planet team reports that a scoped cohort application takes several weeks to several months, and two specialized applications evolved over about sixteen months.
Yale New Haven Health's outpatient pharmacy moved to Compass Rose in May 2023 and, per its 2025 NCODA poster, was still building customized tasks eleven months after go-live.
Health systems post permanent Healthy Planet and Compass Rose analyst roles covering configuration, maintenance, upgrades, and optimization. Intermountain's current posting is a representative example: a permanent role covering configuration, maintenance, upgrades, testing, and ongoing optimization.
A Tennessee public budget lists $192,792 for one year of ongoing Epic CareLink and Healthy Planet Link access and support for community providers, a combined scope rather than a license price.

Those numbers are not a price list, and they do not say Epic is overpriced. They say the module stack is a program you staff and operate, year after year. KLAS's own value-based care research found that nearly all Epic respondents pair Healthy Planet with another solution for aggregating outside data, analytics, or care management. The same firm gave Epic its 2025 Best in KLAS award in the category. Both facts are true at once, and together they describe the market accurately: a strong platform that most organizations still surround with other tools.

The dimension that decides it: who controls change

Feature tables age faster than this next part does. When a quality lead wants to reweight priorities because a contract added a measure, or a pharmacy team wants a surge on statin adherence six weeks before year-end, somebody has to change the system.

In the Epic stack, that somebody is a certified analyst working a governed build queue. If the organization owns its instance and staffs the queue well, changes take whatever the queue takes. If the organization is an affiliate riding a health system's instance through Community Connect, where the host owns and maintains the environment, its requests compete with every department of the host, and the host's priorities win. That is not a flaw. It is what shared enterprise governance is for. But it means the pace of your quality program is set by someone whose bonus does not depend on your Stars result.

Pelica inverts that. The team that owns the risk owns the rules: cohorts, weights, assignment logic, campaigns, exports. Changes ship in days, and customer requests have shipped in hours. For an ACO or a delegated group mid-measurement-year, that difference compounds weekly.

Running both, which is the common case

Where Pelica and Epic practices overlap today, both run, permanently. The division of labor is clean.

Epic stays the clinical system of record and the point-of-care surface. Visits, orders, BPAs, Health Maintenance, MyChart: untouched, native, where clinicians already work. Pelica takes the between-visit, cross-payer layer. It ingests every contract's files, scores and assigns the work, makes the calls and documents them, chases the practices that are not on Epic, runs provider follow-up, and sends supplemental data back to each payer in that payer's own format. Closed work writes back to the source systems, so the chart reflects what happened.

For a CIN or a health-system medical group, the same split holds with a different boundary: Epic covers the employed practices, Pelica covers the affiliated ones and the payer seams between them.

The numbers we can stand behind, from production: 96 to 98% adherence on the three triple-weighted Part D measures, roughly 90% of breast cancer screening and kidney health evaluation gaps closed in-year, 70%+ of transitions-of-care gaps closed within 30 days, and weekly assignment preparation cut from about eight hours to fifteen minutes. At our flagship customer, a physician-led IPA in New York running risk on about 175,000 patients across roughly 1,000 providers, adoption reached 100% and teams got back around ten hours per user per week.

70%+

Transitions-of-care gaps closed within 30 days

100%

Team adoption at a 175,000-patient New York IPA

2 wks

To the first live workflow, no analyst hires

And the honest limits, in one place: Pelica is not an EHR, has no point-of-care decision support inside the visit, no certified HEDIS measure engine, no RADV submission product, no patient portal, and is a far smaller company than Epic. If any of those is the purchase, we are the wrong call.

Questions that settle it faster than a demo

Whichever way you lean, these turn the comparison into diligence. Put them to your Epic team, or your health system partner, and to us.

Which payer feeds are live, validated, and reconciled today, and what is the dated plan for the rest of the contracts?
Which modules are actually licensed: Healthy Planet, Compass Rose, Cheers, Cogito and Caboodle, EpicCare Link, Payer Platform?
Who owns the build backlog, and how fast can the quality or pharmacy lead change assignment rules, priorities, or a campaign?
Can one queue cover Epic and non-Epic practices, respecting what each coordinator can access?
Can prioritization combine refill timing, contract value, threshold distance, and reachability per member, and who maintains that logic?
How are outreach calls, pharmacy contacts, supplemental data submissions, and roster exceptions captured and reported today?
What does the provider-facing view show across all contracts, and does it include what each provider has earned?
What analyst and support capacity is committed after go-live, and what does it cost per year?

An Epic team with strong answers to all eight is a real thing, and if you have one, you should probably use it. Most risk-bearing groups we meet get strong answers to two or three.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

What buyers ask when Epic's population health stack and Pelica come up in the same evaluation.

What is Epic Healthy Planet?

Healthy Planet is Epic's population health module. Per Epic's own materials it covers patient registries, care gap tracking, risk stratification, contract and quality analytics, and ACO reporting, built on data in the Epic system plus imported claims and external data. It is licensed separately from the core EHR and configured by certified analysts, so what Healthy Planet does at any given organization depends on that organization's build.

What is the difference between Healthy Planet and Compass Rose?

Healthy Planet is the population health and analytics layer: registries, care gaps, risk, reporting. Compass Rose is Epic's care management module: care programs, tasks, outreach calls, assessments, and work queues for coordinators. They are separate modules with separate licenses and builds. Epic publishes little detail about Compass Rose publicly; the clearest descriptions come from customer implementation studies.

Does Epic have AI agents?

Yes, and the line is expanding quickly. Art's AI charting for clinicians went generally available in February 2026, Emmie is live for patients inside MyChart with two-way text messaging rolling out, Penny serves revenue cycle, and Agent Factory, a no-code agent builder, was previewed at HIMSS in March 2026. These serve the chart, the clinician, the patient portal, and the back office. We did not find published documentation of autonomous outbound phone agents that call members, pharmacies, and prescriber offices as of August 12, 2026.

Can Epic ingest payer data and care gaps?

Yes. open.epic documents bulk imports for care gaps, risk adjustment, and supplemental data, and Payer Platform exchanges claims, diagnoses, and care gaps directly with participating payers. The qualifier is operational: Payer Platform requires each payer to participate plan by plan, and other feeds are built as interface projects by the organization's analysts. Whether a given organization's feeds are live and accurate is a build question, not a product question.

Does Pelica replace Epic Healthy Planet?

No. Epic stays the clinical system of record, and point-of-care gap closure inside Epic practices stays in Epic, where it is genuinely strong. Pelica runs the work between visits and outside the chart: payer file intake across all contracts, outbound calls, cross-network worklists, provider follow-up, and supplemental data back to payers, and writes results back to the source systems. Pelica is built to run alongside Epic.

How long does Epic Healthy Planet take to implement?

There is no standard public figure, and any single number would mislead. Public examples run from several weeks to several months per cohort application at Mayo Clinic, to an 18-month registry collaboration at UMMC, and Yale New Haven Health's pharmacy was still building customized Compass Rose tasks eleven months after go-live. Health systems also post permanent Healthy Planet and Compass Rose analyst roles, which is the clearest signal that the module is an ongoing operating function rather than an install.

When is Pelica a better fit than Epic's population health modules?

When the daily work lives outside any single chart: payer files arriving from several contracts in several formats, members to call, pharmacies to check, practices on different EHRs to follow up with, and a team that needs to change its own rules without waiting on a build queue. When the work is point-of-care closure inside Epic practices, Epic is the better answer, and Pelica writes its results back into it.

Epic runs the chart. Someone still has to run the work.

Thirty minutes, on a canonical record stitched from your own sample feeds, next to whatever your Epic build does today. 70%+ of transitions-of-care gaps closed within 30 days, first workflow live in about two weeks, no analyst hires.

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