When Judy Faulkner enters it all the sprawling whimsical campus of Epic Systems at Verona in Wisconsin, it hardly feels like the technology headquarters; instead, it’s like a candy store for software in contemporary times. Some castles with treehouses and winding underground tunnels occupy the landscape of one of the most successful yet least flashy health-tech companies in the world. At 82 years of age, Faulkner, the founder of Epic Systems, has built a digital empire and also gave the somewhat disjointed transformation of healthcare data into a rhythmic flow, from one entity to another, across the length and breadth of the United States and beyond.
Her story, having in itself a bit too much Florida sunshine, conjures a whimsy of American innovation, one half Bill Gates computing revolution, one-half Willy Wonka crafting a world that is half mysterious, half scrupulously engineered. Currently, Epic’s EHR systems serve over 300 million patients globally, supporting hospitals and clinics from community localities up to medical giants such as Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic.
A Reluctant Billionaire
Far from being public-facing celebrities, Faulkner never came into the limelight. She is not pressed for attention and almost never grants interviews, remaining obscure outside the health sector until recently. Yet her wealth is estimated by Forbes at over $7 billion, placing her among the richest self-made women in the world.
Rarely did Faulkner speak in public about her thoughts. “I never wished to be rich,” she said. “I wanted to make good software that could help people.”
Faulkner was born in New Jersey in 1943. She studied mathematics until she acquired a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Wisconsin. It was in Madison where she started experimenting with ways to digitize patient records long before “electronic health” became a buzzword. The company started-rightfully badly, with three workers in a basement and a $70,000 investment from friends and family.
Today, that little basement has evolved into a fairy-tale campus for a global coiled spring of more than 13,000 employees.
The Epic Ecosystem
If Epic has a certain allure to it, surely much of that mystique emerges from the campus itself. Straddling nearly 1,200 acres, the headquarters looks all the more like a theme park, perhaps less so for the tech industry. Staff members walk past wizard towers, space stations, and medieval villages to code and maintain the complex systems that hold patient data. Faulkner had clear intent: to build a place where the creative could undertake difficult work yet still feel as if they were doing something rather extraordinary.
Epic’s endeavors are no less ambitious inside their walls. Epic’s software has had a prevalence in the U.S. healthcare landscape, with more than 60 percent of the country’s patients having their medical records stored on Epic. Hospitals pay millions of dollars to install and retain these platforms, ranging from medical history to billing systems.
Yet for all its dominance, Epic does have its critics. Clinical providers find the user interface clunky, whereas policymakers express concern about this near-monopoly in health IT. Epic’s resistance has also been directed at proprietary data-sharing standards, though during the last several years it has been under considerable federal pressure to relax these restrictions to the end of fostering interoperability.
Contrast with Silicon Valley
Faulkner’s management style is in total contrast with those in Silicon Valley. She avoids venture capital and remains steadfast against taking the company public, arguing that going public would force Epic to start beholding their shareholders rather than itsPatients.
In her own words, “We don’t want to be another tech firm chasing quarterly profits.” Epic instead spends heavily on research and developments of updates and expansions that bind hospitals to its ecosystem.
This philosophy has endowed Epic with remarkable longevity. While other tech firms soared and crashed with the markets, Epic has quietly plodded along the path of steady growth for more than four decades. Its revenues, in the billions on some independent estimations, are private, and so Faulkner and her team can make decisions without the prying eyes of Wall Street.
The Willy Wonka Comparison
Epic’s weirdness, crowned by Faulkner’s cloistered leadership, has invited comparison with Willy Wonka. Like Wonka’s chocolate factory, it’s a place where outsiders rarely get in, or if they do, they are often far too dazzled to grasp the full scope of bizarre design.
Conference rooms are fashioned after pirate ships. Hallways channel guests into replica train cars. The company holds a users’ meeting every year, when thousands of doctors, administrators, and tech experts descend upon Verona for what some call the “Woodstock of healthcare IT.”
The show put on for the public has its reality: Faulkner’s factory does not produce candy but rather the digital mechanics behind modern healthcare. From a patient’s perspective, it could be as simple as logging into MyChart, the portal where they check lab results, message a doctor, or schedule an appointment. All the while, Epic’s systems sew together everything from diagnostic imaging to billing codes on the back end.
An Era of Transition
Now, at age 82, Faulkner is getting ready for what lies beyond her. In 2015, she entered the Giving Pledge, committing to donate 99% of her wealth to philanthropy. She also created a trust that owns Epic, making it impossible for the company to be sold or taken public after her.”
The healthcare industry hails this initiative as a move that will keep Epic independent, a hiss-terical rarity in an industry where every horizon is lined with mergers and acquisitions. Still, many questions remain about succession. Can Epic remain dominant without its enigmatic founder? And in a quickly evolving world of AI, digital health startups, and cloud-based solutions, will Epic’s software factory become the industry’s another gold standard?
The Larger Legacy
Faulkner’s imprint extends well beyond Epic’s balance sheets. Her legacy has forever changed the way healthcare providers interact with the patient by digitizing health records. Before, everything was handwritten, messy, and prone to error; now everything lies within a tap of a screen. Supporters claim Epic has saved lives through rapid diagnoses and improved communication; on the other hand, opponents say it has exacerbated physician burnout because doctors find themselves clicking screens for hours rather than conversing with patients.
Both may be true. However, Judy Faulkner’s vision has really withstood the test of time. From its beginning in a basement, she has built an organization worth billions: a software empire that in castle and spaceship bars all commercialism, set firm on a bent refusal to marry with the corporate world in quarterly earnings.
This is the way that, maybe, a slight comparison to Bill Gates and Willy Wonka would be appropriate. As we have heard, Faulkner used computing power to transform an industry, much like Gates; yet unlike Gates, she worked in an odd way, mixing pragmatism with enchantment.
For the millions of patients whose records move across the wire every day through Epic’s systems, her factory is no fantasy. It is the quiet machinery of modern medicine, a legacy that far outstrips and outlasts the fairy-tale campus where it all began.
