How Judith built the fortune
Judy Faulkner started Epic in 1979 in a basement office in Madison, Wisconsin, with a small loan from relatives and a single part-time employee. The company, first called Human Services Computing, sold software for managing patient information at a time when most medical records were still kept on paper. Its early products grew out of database work Faulkner had done while a graduate student, and that technical foundation, a system able to store large volumes of clinical data, became the core of the company.
Growth was gradual for two decades, then accelerated sharply after 2009, when the federal HITECH Act offered American hospitals incentive payments for adopting electronic health records. Large health systems wanted one integrated platform for scheduling, billing, clinical notes and patient access, and Epic's single-database approach won many of the biggest contracts. Its patient portal, MyChart, became familiar to millions of Americans.
Faulkner has run Epic without outside investors, has never taken it public and has avoided acquisitions. She holds a large ownership stake, widely reported at about half, which is the source of her fortune.
Epic's rise also reflects a deliberate business model. The company sells long-term licences and maintenance agreements to large health systems, installs its software with its own staff rather than relying heavily on outside consultants, and expects customers to standardise on its platform. Critics have at times argued that this approach makes it hard for hospitals to share data with systems from other vendors, a charge Epic has disputed while expanding its interoperability tools.
Companies and holdings
Epic Systems is the only significant business associated with Faulkner. The company is based on a large campus in Verona, a town outside Madison, known for its themed buildings and its rule that employees work on site. Epic serves hospital systems, academic medical centres and clinics across the United States and in a number of other countries.
The company's products cover:
- Electronic health records used by clinicians
- Revenue cycle, scheduling and billing tools
- MyChart, the patient-facing app and website
- Cosmos, a large de-identified data set drawn from participating organisations
Faulkner has said she intends Epic to remain private and has put in place governance arrangements meant to keep it independent after her.
The campus itself has become part of the company's identity, with buildings designed around themes and a large auditorium for its annual user gathering, which draws thousands of customers to Wisconsin each year.
Early life and career
Judith Greenfield was born in 1943 and grew up near Philadelphia, the daughter of a pharmacist and a mother active in civic causes. She studied mathematics at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1965, and then earned a master's degree in computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967.
After graduate school she stayed in Madison, working on computing projects connected to the university's medical school, where she helped develop a database for tracking patient information. She also taught programming. That experience with clinical data management led directly to the founding of her company.
Her experience at the university showed her how badly clinicians needed tools that could link scheduling, test results and histories. She has described the company's early years as a period of slow, careful growth, with a strong preference for hiring young graduates and training them internally, a practice Epic still follows.
Philanthropy and public life
In 2015 Faulkner signed the Giving Pledge and said she planned to give away almost all of her wealth. Her letter for the pledge set out the goal of directing the money mainly to early childhood, health and other causes intended to help children and families. She established the Roots and Wings Foundation to support early childhood development.
Faulkner is known for an informal, eccentric leadership style, including costumed appearances at Epic's annual user meeting, but she rarely engages in public debates outside health technology. She has served on federal advisory bodies on health information technology.
She has also used her position to argue that health records should be designed around patients and clinicians, and Epic has invested in features that let patients view results, message doctors and share information between providers.