Inside Epic Systems’ mythical campus, a world away from Wall Street

Dorothy Gale was right — the Land of Oz isn’t in Kansas. Relatively, it’s nestled inside the rolling green fields of Verona, Wisconsin, a town of nearly 16,400 people situated about 10 miles southwest of the capital city of Madison.

Verona is home to the whimsical, sprawling 1,670-acre headquarters for Epic Systems, one among the largest privately held U.S. tech corporations. Epic’s software is seemingly ubiquitous across hospitals and clinics, storing the medical records of greater than 280 million people within the U.S.

While the corporate’s workforce is tasked with the hefty responsibility of constructing tools to support doctors and nurses as they supply care to patients, Epic employees spend their days milling out and in of offices that look as in the event that they were plucked straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel or kid’s book.

A yellow brick road inspired by “The Wizard of Oz” winds through the hallways of a gleaming, emerald green constructing. Giant chocolate chips mark the entryway to the chocolate factory, and a mischievous cat grins through the window of a constructing guarded by life-sized playing cards.  

Last week, 1000’s of health-care executives descended on Epic’s sprawling campus for the corporate’s annual Users Group Meeting, partially to listen to about recent products and upcoming initiatives. This yr’s theme was “storytime,” and Judy Faulkner, the corporate’s 81-year-old CEO, took the stage dressed as a swan, complete with a plume of feathers in her hair.

Faulkner, a reserved mathematician who founded Epic in a basement in 1979, told the gang that the encompassing buildings and their upkeep account for 8% of the corporate’s total expenses. But she made the apparent point, that it’s so much cheaper for Epic to purchase land and construct in Verona than it might be in a tech hub like San Francisco, Seattle or Latest York. And on this small midwestern town, the corporate is removed from big city distractions.

“Most of us in software development are lively sci-fi readers,” Faulkner said during her keynote. 

For public market investors, Epic has all the time been somewhat of a fantasy.

The corporate, with its 14,000-person workforce, doesn’t follow a preordained budget, has made zero acquisitions and never accepted any investment from enterprise capitalists. It abides by its own set of Ten Commandments, in line with its website, the primary of which is, “don’t go public.”

Epic generated revenue last yr of $4.9 billion. Cerner, Epic’s top rival within the electronic medical records market, went public in 1986 and was acquired by Oracle in 2022 for over $28 billion. In response to Oracle’s financials, Cerner contributed $5.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023.

The S&P 500’s sub-index of software and services corporations trades for 9 times revenue. At the common, that might give Epic a valuation of roughly $45 billion.

Faulkner doesn’t take care of a Cerner-like end result. Epic’s second commandment, in spite of everything, is “don’t be acquired.”

“Why be owned by people whose interest is primarily return of equity?” Faulkner said onstage last week.

Touring Epic’s campus, it’s clear that the corporate exists a universe away from Wall Street.

Each of Epic’s 28 office constructing is themed. They’re clustered into mini-campuses, with names like Prairie Campus, Farm Campus, Central Park Campus, Wizards Academy Campus and Storybook Campus. The buildings have gotten more ornate through the years, which has necessitated some haggling with architects, in line with Epic’s website.

Conference room chairs match their buildings’ intricate themes. And while the campus’ dinosaurs, suits of armor and its functioning carousel are fun to watch, additionally they serve a purpose. Faulkner says her plan was to construct a friendly environment that might attract and encourage talent and to be sure that her employees have the quiet space they must be productive, in line with a series of testimonials on Epic’s website.  

“We compete with big tech,” Faulkner said in a testimonial. “These attributes help us hire the very best staff possible. That helps us be more productive.”

Faulkner says individual offices ought to be available to each employee who wants one. With the overwhelming majority of the corporate’s workforce showing up day by day to headquarters, some people double up, since hiring often outpaces construction.

Those that need to escape the office altogether, can hop on one among the corporate’s 600 cow-print bikes to take meetings from a treehouse, slide down a rabbit hole or grab lunch in a train automotive. 

A universe underground

Epic’s address provides the primary clue of its netherworld existence. The corporate is situated at 1979 Milky Way, a nod to the date of its inception and Faulkner’s affinity for a celestial theme.

Visitors are greeted by an indication that reads “Epic Intergalactic Headquarters” as they travel down a road that winds between buildings and vast fields of green. Around 750 acres of Epic’s campus are lively farmland sprinkled with 42 sheep, 14 cows and a donkey.   

Nearly all of the corporate’s parking structures are underground, which helps the campus maintain a formidable feel from above. It also means employees do not have to fret about scraping snow or ice off of their cars throughout the bitter midwestern winter. 

Even when not parking, staff aren’t any strangers to the underground. The campus’ buildings are connected via a network of tunnels and enclosed skyways, so people do not have to step outside to travel between them. 

Employees are also required to attend a monthly staff meeting in an underground auditorium called Deep Space. The meetings last for around two hours, and employees present projects and discuss industry trends.

They all the time include a grammar lesson, too, Faulkner told the Users Group Meeting within the auditorium, which opened in 2013 and may seat around 11,400 people. The room is a feat of engineering, as there aren’t any pillars holding it up.

To get to Deep Space, visitors must descend through levels of the Earth. Different levels of the constructing are named Sky, Grass, Dirt, Rock, Magma and Core. The lobby outside the auditorium is inspired by “The Lord of the Rings” series, and the word “precious” is scrawled ominously on the wall in giant, glowing red letters.   

Sci-fi references are all over the place. There is a cafeteria called 42, which is the reply to the query of life, the universe and all the pieces within the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The Wizards Academy Campus draws clear inspiration from “Harry Potter,” and has its own King’s Cross train station, giant chess set and collection of unruly portraits.  

Epic is constructing a brand recent campus, on the identical grounds, that is inspired by epic fantasies like “Game of Thrones” and “Star Wars.” The cranes were decorated with massive kites that soared high above the campus during last week’s event.

Though each office constructing sports its own unique theme, the skeleton of the physical structures are all very similar. Long hallways of offices are broken up by the occasional conference room, and most buildings aren’t any greater than three stories tall, a design selection that Faulkner says is meant to advertise in-person meetings.

The Prairie Campus, home to the oldest offices at Epic, has buildings named after celestial bodies like stars, planets and galaxies.  

On the Storybook Campus, the constructing called Mystery looks like an old mansion, where one could easily imagine Sherlock Holmes wandering the halls. The Castaway constructing resembles a ship, and its interior is stuffed with nautical decor.

The partitions in most of the buildings are decorated from floor to ceiling. Trinkets, ceramics, mosaics and paintings sourced from local artists are displayed at every turn.

Wandering the grounds throughout the Users Group Meeting, it was easy to forget that Epic is a software company.

Nonetheless, on the skin of its fantasy campus, medical professionals and their patients have very real-world needs from this massive technology vendor. And there are many very real critics.

Epic has for years been accused of dragging its feet around interoperability efforts that might help streamline the exchange of patient information between vendors.

Health-care data within the U.S. has historically been siloed and difficult to maneuver around, as clinics, hospitals and health systems can store their information in quite a lot of formats across dozens of various vendors. The information can also be protected by federal laws just like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

Oracle, which is now Epic’s chief rival, says Epic is fiercely protective over its turf. In a May blog post, Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone within the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the only biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability.”

Epic has of late been helping the federal government establish an information exchange network called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, which goals to iron out each the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data at scale. Epic said last month that it’s planning on moving all of its customers to TEFCA by the top of next yr.

But the corporate still plans to make use of its extensive proprietary network. At its Users Group Meeting, Epic announced a variety of recent generative artificial intelligence features for its Cosmos platform, which is a deidentified patient dataset that clinicians can use to support treatment and conduct research.

Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice chairman of research and development, spoke to reporters after the keynote in a gathering room decorated like a lodge. Hain had just presented a lofty demo to the audience where an AI agent evaluated his recovery after a supposed wrist surgery by cross-referencing data from Cosmos.

He said these varieties of tools could possibly be ready in as soon as a couple of years.

“The technology is progressing very rapidly,” Hain said.

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