What You Should Know
- The Tech: CharmHealth has launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Originally championed by companies like Anthropic, MCP is an open standard that allows AI models to securely connect to local data sources without needing custom-built APIs for every single action.
- The Impact: Instead of forcing developers to read extensive API documentation and build complex connectors, the MCP server allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to use natural language requests to fetch structured data directly from the Electronic Health Record (EHR).
- The Use Cases: This infrastructure upgrade paves the way for “Agentic AI” in the clinic. Developers can now easily build AI agents that handle clinical summarization, context-aware documentation, appointment scheduling, and real-time decision support (like flagging drug interactions).
Why MCP Matters More Than APIs
To understand why this is a big deal, you have to look at how AI actually works.
If you want an AI to summarize a patient’s medical history, the AI needs to read the chart. In the traditional model, a developer has to write specific code to fetch the patient’s ID, query the database for their medications, query another database for their lab results, and feed all of that to the AI.
With the Model Context Protocol—an open standard recently popularized by Anthropic (creators of the Claude LLM)—that friction vanishes. The MCP server acts as a universal translator. An AI can simply output a natural language intent (e.g., “Get me the latest lab results and active medications for patient X”), and the MCP server translates that request into secure, structured interactions with the EHR database.
It dramatically lowers the barrier to entry. Developers can now build highly sophisticated healthcare applications without needing deep, proprietary expertise in CharmHealth’s backend architecture.
Enabling “Agentic” Healthcare
By embedding AI access as core infrastructure rather than a bolt-on feature, CharmHealth is setting the stage for Agentic AI—systems that don’t just answer questions, but actively execute tasks alongside the clinician.
Because the MCP server handles the complexity of data retrieval while respecting existing security, permissions, and compliance frameworks, developers can quickly deploy agents for:
- Clinical Summarization: Instantly synthesizing complex patient histories before an encounter.
- Decision Support: Catching potential drug interactions or highlighting abnormal lab trends in real-time.
- Administrative Automation: Managing scheduling and task management based on conversational inputs.
“With our MCP server, AI tools can now work directly and responsibly with CharmHealth data through standardized, secure interfaces,” said Pramila Srinivasan, Ph.D., CEO of CharmHealth.
Developers can enable the CharmHealth MCP server connection with their LLM, starting today, by going to https://github.com/CharmHealth/charm-mcp-server.
