How Epic’s 82-year-old CEO Judy Faulkner built her software factory

Don’t go public. Don’t acquire or be acquired. Software must work.

These are the primary three of the ten commandments splashed across bathrooms and breakrooms at Epic Systems’ sprawling 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin, just southwest of Madison. 

It is not the wackiest a part of working on the health-care software giant. Once a month, many of the company’s 14,000 employees pack into an underground auditorium called Deep Space for a compulsory staff meeting, which some jokingly confer with as “work church.” Executives go over company news and objectives. In addition they lead a grammar lesson, corresponding to whether it’s OK to finish sentences with a preposition and when to make use of “who” or “whom.”

Epic’s CEO is 82-year-old Judy Faulkner, who began the corporate in a Wisconsin basement in 1979 and has helmed the enterprise ever since. En path to constructing a business with $5.7 billion in annual revenue, Faulkner has kept significant distance from her tech peers, each physically and otherwise. Epic is about 2,000 miles east of each Seattle and Silicon Valley, and the corporate has never taken money from enterprise capitalists.

“I’ve described her as a female cross between Bill Gates and Willy Wonka,” Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Memorial Health, said in an interview. The hospital system is an Epic customer, Dickson said, adding that he’s known Faulkner for around 20 years.

While Wonka is, after all, a fictional character, Gates for a few years was the world’s wealthiest person, because of his enormous stake in Microsoft, before donating his strategy to 14th on the Forbes billionaires list. At the highest of the leaderboard is Tesla’s Elon Musk, followed by Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Faulkner ranks 430th, with an estimated net price of $7.8 billion, based on what Forbes says is her 43% ownership of Epic. The publication lists Epic as among the many five largest private U.S. tech software and services corporations by revenue. 

Epic is best known for its dominance in electronic health record, or EHR, software. An EHR is a digital version of a patient’s medical history that is updated by doctors and nurses. About 42% of acute care hospitals within the U.S. use Epic, putting it way ahead of Oracle Health, which is in second place at 23%, in keeping with an April report from Klas Research. Oracle acquired its way into the market with the $28 billion purchase of Cerner, a deal that closed in 2022. 

Epic says its technology is utilized in 3,300 hospitals and 71,000 clinics and by 325 million patients worldwide. Starting Monday, 1000’s of health-care executives will descend on Epic’s corporate headquarters for the corporate’s Users Group Meeting, one among its largest annual on-campus events.

As ubiquitous as Epic’s technology is across much of the health-care sector, doctors, hospital administrators, startups and patients have their share of complaints concerning the software’s user experience and its interoperability, or ability to work with other tools.

“With half one million or so clinicians using Epic, there will probably be some who find it easy and a few who find it difficult,” an Epic spokesperson said in a press release.

Some folks might query Epic’s commitment to its third commandment, but there isn’t any doubting the corporate’s allegiance to the primary one.

From Epic’s early days, Faulkner has been averse to the concept of running a public company and what she’s called the “tyranny of the quarter.” She said she got here to that view after researching public corporations and reading shareholder comments. 

“They were vitriolic, in lots of cases, since the only thing they were was return on their investment,” Faulkner told CNBC. “Sometimes, there’s quite a bit greater than that.”

Without the advantage of public stock, Faulkner’s wealth doesn’t multiply at the identical rate as that of her fellow tech founders and CEOs. She’s effective with that. 

Faulkner, who rarely grants interviews, agreed to take a seat down for a half-hour chat with CNBC at Epic’s headquarters, where office buildings are themed, with many inspired by fiction, including “The Wizard of Oz,” “Alice in Wonderland” and the Harry Potter stories.

The interview took place within the Andromeda constructing in a conference room called The Cottage, which is connected to her office. Two of the partitions are plastered with quotes corresponding to “The geek shall inherit the Earth” and “All lasting business is built on friendship.” Faulkner’s dog Tundra, a fluffy Samoyed, also made an appearance.

Faulkner celebrated her 82nd birthday Monday. While she has yet to publicly disclose when she plans to step down from her role, Faulkner confirmed that she has a succession plan in place that ensures Epic will remain privately held and constructed firmly as she envisioned long after she’s gone. 

Faulkner has never sold any of her voting shares, and that stock will probably be transferred right into a trust after her death, in keeping with Faulkner and Epic. The plan for now could be that the trust will probably be governed by a voting committee made up of Faulkner’s husband, Dr. Gordon Faulkner, a retired pediatrician; her three children, and five longtime Epic employees, though Faulkner said she might include some additional staffers to make certain enough voices are represented. 

Members of the committee cannot vote for the corporate to go public or be acquired, amongst other rules, as she has previously disclosed. Among the provisions are less consequential, corresponding to a suggestion that the trust’s telephone hold music must be classical. 

“I like classical music,” she said. “I feel after I was a baby that it was played in our house quite a bit, just on the radio, just on the record player.” 

For further safekeeping, Faulkner established an oversight board called “The Trust Protector Committee,” Epic said, consisting of three health-care leaders — all Epic users. Its job is to sue members of the trust’s voting committee in the event that they don’t follow the principles. 

The names of members of the voting committee and oversight board won’t be released, Faulkner told CNBC, but she said she’s identified who she would really like to participate. 

After running Epic for the past 46 years, Faulkner has amassed her fair proportion of admirers and critics, with some within the latter camp even taking Epic to court.

Faulkner’s parents, who each died in 2007, are honored at Epic’s campus. Employees can get ice cream at Lou’s Soda Fountain, while Del’s Nobel Prize certificate hangs within the hallway across from The Cottage.

Faulkner discovered a love of math as a seventh grader, when her teacher would go away puzzles on the blackboard every day, she said in one among her testimonials, the short stories and anecdotes she shares once a month on Epic’s website. She earned her undergraduate degree in math from Dickinson College in 1965.

After learning methods to program during a summer job, Faulkner then enrolled within the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s nascent computer science program and was in graduate school there until 1970.

At UW–Madison, Faulkner took a course about computing in medicine that was taught by a pioneering physician, Dr. Warner Slack, one among the primary people to acknowledge the promise of the technology inside health care.

Faulkner began working with Slack and his team, and she or he was tasked with developing a system that might keep track of patient information over time. She eventually built what would turn into the kernel for Epic, though it took years of urging from potential users before she would actually launch the corporate in 1979. Within the interim, she taught college-level computer science.

When Faulkner finally opened Epic for business, she did so with a small amount of money from some colleagues at an initial valuation of $70,000. Now the corporate is price many billions of dollars, though estimates of its valuation differ.

Among the original shareholders eventually sold their stock back to the corporate.

“They got superb returns,” Faulkner wrote in a testimonial.

“It was a five-minute meeting — perhaps the shortest in history,” Immelt said, in keeping with a report from Healthcare IT News. The report said he’d also considered buying Cerner.

Faulkner confirmed the encounter with CNBC.

“Others have asked to come back and persuade us, and I’ve heard our staff say to them, ‘Just leave your automobile running,'” she said.

Faulkner has said in testimonials that she’s avoided buyers with a view to remain independent and preserve Epic’s unique culture, and she or he doesn’t make acquisitions, calling them a distraction.

But irrespective of how much she loves her company and her job, in some unspecified time in the future, anyone else goes to must run Epic.

Faulkner has remained mum about who will probably be her eventual successor, aside from to say that the person can have to be a software developer and a longtime Epic worker.

The apparent selection, in keeping with 10 former Epic employees who spoke with CNBC, is Sumit Rana, who was named president of the corporate last August. The 49-year-old joined Epic right out of faculty in 1998 and helped construct the corporate’s patient portal called MyChart. 

Rana, who was a toddler when Faulkner founded Epic, has been participating in additional high-profile speaking engagements of late, including representing the corporate throughout the opening panel on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Quality Conference in July.

Faulkner declined to say whether Rana is the highest contender for the job. 

“That is the corporate’s business,” she said. “Sumit is an excellent worker, and he would make CEO, but we’re not publicly announcing anything.”

While Faulkner doesn’t say much concerning the company’s succession plans, she hasn’t been shy about her plans for her personal wealth.

In 2015, she signed The Giving Pledge and agreed to donate 99% of her assets to charity, a choice that was inspired partly by a dinner she had with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett that yr.

Buffett created The Giving Pledge with Bill Gates and Gates’ then wife, Melinda French Gates, in 2010, encouraging the world’s richest people to present away nearly all of their wealth. 

Following Faulkner’s pledge, she launched a family foundation called Roots & Wings together with her husband in 2020. Roots & Wings provides grants to nonprofits that support low-income children and families. Faulkner’s daughter, Shana Dall’Osto, serves as executive director of the organization. 

Faulkner has been selling her nonvoting shares back to the corporate, giving the proceeds on to Roots & Wings. 

“I’ve never cashed a single share for myself,” Faulkner told CNBC.

Installing an EHR is a particularly complicated and dear project for health systems. If it doesn’t go well, it could “blow up” the entire business, Dr. Robert Grossman, CEO of NYU Langone Health, told CNBC in an interview. 

“We bet the ranch on Epic, let’s be very honest,” he said.

Fans of Epic say the corporate is fully tuned in to its customers’ needs.

“They do not just operate and dial in,” said Michael Mayo, CEO of ​​Baptist Health in northeast Florida. “They visit our campus. They’re immersed here. They know our teams across our IT [information technology] component and our caregivers. They’re in our facilities. And once we went live, which is a reasonably scary time, they were in full force here.”

Each health system that uses Epic has a degree person called a “BFF,” or “best friend eternally,” who is offered to reply questions and help solve problems. Epic doesn’t outsource any incoming calls to 3rd parties, the corporate says, so staff members are answerable for picking up the phone 24/7.

Faulkner also makes herself easily accessible to customers, executives said.

Mike Slubowski, CEO of Trinity Health, which operates 93 hospitals across 26 states, said Faulkner all the time answers his emails inside the day, if not the hour. 

She holds recurring meetings with senior health-care executives by phone or video call to reply questions and talk through a company’s specific needs and concepts. Executives told CNBC that Faulkner takes copious notes and is receptive to feedback. If she doesn’t have a solution, she promptly calls someone who does. 

“She’ll stop right there and say, ‘Get so-and-so on the phone,'” said Dickson, of UMass Memorial Health. “I do not know what so-and-so was doing prior to getting the decision, but it surely’s clear that when Judy calls, you drop what you are doing.”

Pete Durlach, corporate vp for health and life sciences at Microsoft, said he’s been in meetings with Epic staffers who’ve gotten these impromptu calls. Microsoft and Epic have been close partners for around twenty years, a relationship that is gotten tighter as cloud and artificial intelligence technologies have advanced, he said. 

Epic faces accusations of anticompetitive practices in two lawsuits from the past yr. One was filed in September by data startup Particle Health, which alleges that Epic has used its EHR market power to “snuff out” competition in other emerging health-care markets.

Epic said in response it could “vigorously defend itself against Particle’s meritless claims.”

The second lawsuit was filed in May by CureIS Healthcare, a managed care services company that claims Epic has engaged in a “multi-prong scheme to destroy” CureIS’ business. CureIS alleges Epic has interfered with its customer relationships, blocked access to mandatory data and raised unfounded security concerns, in keeping with a grievance.

An Epic spokesperson told CNBC on the time of the filing that the corporate “believes in free and fair competition, and we also consider our customers are in the very best position to decide on the best solutions to satisfy their needs — whether with Epic or by adopting other services.” 

Epic’s competitors have also long accused the corporate of being territorial over its data and impeding efforts to share patient information between vendors. 

In a blog post last yr, Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone within the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the one biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability.” 

Interoperability, on this case, refers back to the exchange of electronic health data from one health-care organization to a different. Since health data is siloed, stored across dozens of formats and guarded by federal laws corresponding to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, it’s a fancy undertaking.

Over time, startups corresponding to Practice Fusion and DrChrono have tried to crack the EHR market with guarantees of greater openness and more user-friendly products, but they’ve never turn into greater than area of interest offerings. Some failed completely.  

Epic promotes its own interoperability tools corresponding to Care In all places and EpicCare Link, which allows customers and their affiliates to exchange data with each other. Epic also participates in larger data exchange networks.

Considered one of Epic’s biggest feats in its 46 years is managing to draw high-level tech talent far-off from the nation’s engineering and business hubs, especially given the cruel Midwestern winters in Wisconsin. 

That is where Epic’s headquarters comes into play. It is a campus that industry executives and former employees likened to a techie’s Disney World. 

Most employees work in person five days per week. Hours could be long and burnout is common, former employees say. In June, The Economist analyzed 900 corporations across 19 industries, and located that Epic had the worst work-life balance within the software and IT services category. Several former employees told CNBC their work at Epic was all-consuming. 

Epic said the typical worker works between 44 and 45 hours per week, based on monthly time sheet submissions between June 2024 and June 2025. The corporate said its turnover rate last yr was 7%.

“People at Epic are dedicated and work hard,” an Epic spokesperson said in a press release.

Epic employees are entrusted with big projects, expected to interact directly with customers and customarily tackle a number of responsibility. For some employees, that features working alongside hospitals as they implement Epic’s technology.

“A few of these implementations really sucked,” said Brendan Keeler, a former Epic worker who ceaselessly blogs concerning the company online. “A lot of the success of an implementation was only a function of the politics of the hospital.”

Epic recruits the overwhelming majority of its employees straight out of faculty, so its staff is comparatively young. All recent staffers undergo extensive training, including a five-hour corporate philosophy class where they’re taught methods to be a successful worker.

Faulkner said she used to show the category by herself but that she now has help from one or two other people.

Faulkner’s influence is present in every corner of Epic’s campus, in its product and across much of the health-care industry.

“Everybody knows Judy Faulkner,” said Thomas, of Sutter Health. 

She’s still got quite a bit to do. The health-care industry is reckoning with rising costs, staffing shortages, the impact of AI and the Trump administration’s hefty cuts within the areas of medical science and research. 

And Faulkner is not able to quit.

“It’s interesting and it’s difficult and it’s worthwhile,” Faulkner said.

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