01The problem
A lot of clinicians already have a favourite AI. They draft letters in ChatGPT, think through cases with Claude, keep a running notebook of questions. What they cannot do is point that AI at the clinic. The chart, the schedule and the queue live inside an EHR with no door, so the AI they trust works from whatever they paste into it.
The workaround is copy and paste, which is slow, and which quietly moves patient information into places it should not be.
02What we saw
Physicians were not asking for another assistant. They were asking for the one they had to know what they know. A practice manager kept a personal AI thread open all day and typed the day’s numbers into it by hand, because the billing system could not be asked a question.
The demand was real, and the tools were good. The missing piece was a safe, permissioned connection between the AI and the record.
03How Spriggan handles it
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for letting an AI platform call tools and read data from another system, with permissions and an audit trail. Spriggan ships an MCP server. Every agent, every record and every workflow is a tool that a connected platform can use, and every call is logged like any other action in the clinic.
In practice a physician can ask Claude to brief her on the next patient, and Claude asks Spriggan. A practice manager can ask ChatGPT what is stuck in prior auth this week, and the answer comes from the same queue the agent is working. The AI is theirs. The clinic, the permissions and the log are ours.
04What AI made possible
Interoperability used to mean interfaces: HL7 feeds, FHIR endpoints, months of mapping. MCP is different in kind, because the thing on the other end can read. It does not need every field mapped in advance; it needs a well-described set of tools and the permission to use them. That collapses an integration project into a connection.
It also means the clinic is no longer choosing an AI. It is choosing the record every AI can use.
An EHR should not have an opinion about which AI you use. It should be the thing every AI can use.
05What changed
The copy-and-paste stopped. Questions about the clinic get answered by the clinic, inside the tool the clinician already lives in, with the same citations and the same log as everything else in Spriggan. As far as we know we are the only EHR with an MCP server today, and we intend to keep it open.