Invoice Gates meets Willy Wonka: How Epic’s 82-year-old billionaire CEO, Judy Faulkner, constructed her instrument manufacturing unit

Don’t exit population. Don’t gain or be obtained. Tool will have to business.

Those are the primary 3 of the ten commandments splashed throughout toilets and breakrooms at Epic Programs’ sprawling 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin, simply southwest of Madison. 

It’s now not the wackiest a part of running on the health-care instrument vast. As soon as a era, lots of the corporate’s 14,000 workers collect into an underground auditorium referred to as Deep Length for a compulsory team of workers assembly, which some jokingly the following as “work church.” Executives exit over corporate information and goals. In addition they supremacy a grammar lesson, akin to whether or not it’s OK to finish sentences with a preposition and when to virtue “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 undertaking ever since. En path to development a industry with $5.7 billion in annual earnings, Faulkner has saved vital distance from her tech friends, each bodily and in a different way. Epic is set 2,000 miles east of each Seattle and Silicon Valley, and the corporate hasn’t ever taken cash from challenge capitalists.

“I’ve described her as a female cross between Bill Gates and Willy Wonka,” Dr. Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Memorial Fitness, mentioned in an interview. The health facility machine is an Epic buyer, Dickson mentioned, including that he’s identified Faulkner for round twenty years.

Year Wonka is, in fact, a fictional persona, Gates for a few years used to be the arena’s wealthiest individual, due to his monumental stake in Microsoft, ahead of donating his approach to 14th at the Forbes billionaires checklist. On the lead of the leaderboard is Tesla’s Elon Musk, adopted by way of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

Faulkner ranks 430th, with an estimated internet virtue of $7.8 billion, in line with what Forbes says is her 43% possession of Epic. The newsletter lists Epic as a few of the 5 biggest non-public U.S. tech instrument and services and products firms by way of earnings. 

Epic is highest identified for its dominance in digital fitness file, or EHR, instrument. An EHR is a virtual model of a affected person’s scientific historical past that’s up to date by way of docs and nurses. About 42% of acute lend a hand hospitals within the U.S. virtue Epic, placing it means forward of Oracle Fitness, which is in 2nd park at 23%, in line with an April record from Klas Analysis. Oracle obtained its means into the marketplace with the $28 billion acquire of Cerner, a do business in that closed in 2022. 

Epic says its era is worn in 3,300 hospitals and 71,000 clinics and by way of 325 million sufferers international. Launch Monday, hundreds of health-care executives will descend on Epic’s company headquarters for the corporate’s Users Group Meeting, considered one of its biggest annual on-campus occasions.

As ubiquitous as Epic’s era is throughout a lot of the health-care sector, docs, health facility directors, startups and sufferers have their proportion of court cases concerning the instrument’s person enjoy and its interoperability, or skill to business with alternative equipment.

“With half a million or so clinicians using Epic, there will be some who find it easy and some who find it difficult,” an Epic spokesperson mentioned in a remark.

Some other people may query Epic’s constancy to its 3rd commandment, however there’s negative doubting the corporate’s allegiance to the primary one.

From Epic’s early days, Faulkner has been averse to the speculation of working a population corporate and what she’s referred to as the “tyranny of the quarter.” She mentioned she got here to that view upcoming researching population firms and studying shareholder feedback. 

“They were vitriolic, in many cases, because the only thing they were looking at was return on their investment,” Faulkner informed CNBC. “Sometimes, there’s a lot more than that.”

With out the advantage of population store, Faulkner’s wealth doesn’t multiply on the identical fee as that of her fellow tech founders and CEOs. She’s tremendous with that. 

Faulkner, who hardly ever grants interviews, correct to sit down ailing for a 30 minutes chat with CNBC at Epic’s headquarters, the place workplace constructions are themed, with many impressed by way of fantasy, together with “The Wizard of Oz,” “Alice in Wonderland” and the Harry Potter tales.

The interview took park within the Andromeda development in a convention room referred to as The Cottage, which is attached to her workplace. Two of the partitions are plastered with quotes akin to “The geek shall inherit the Earth” and “All lasting business is built on friendship.” Faulkner’s canine Tundra, a fluffy Samoyed, additionally made an look.

Faulkner celebrated her 82nd birthday Monday. Year she has but to publicly expose when she plans to step ailing from her function, Faulkner showed that she has a succession plan in park that guarantees Epic will stay privately held and built firmly as she envisioned lengthy upcoming she’s long past. 

Faulkner hasn’t ever offered any of her balloting stocks, and that store will probably be transferred right into a believe upcoming her dying, in line with Faulkner and Epic. The plan for now could be that the believe will probably be ruled by way of a balloting committee made up of Faulkner’s husband, Dr. Gordon Faulkner, a retired pediatrician; her 3 kids, and 5 longtime Epic workers, although Faulkner mentioned she may come with some alternative staffers to put together certain plenty voices are represented. 

Participants of the committee can’t vote for the corporate to exit population or be obtained, amongst alternative laws, as she has in the past disclosed. One of the provisions are much less consequential, akin to a advice that the believe’s phone secure track must be classical. 

“I like classical music,” she mentioned. “I think when I was a child that it was played in our house a lot, just on the radio, just on the record player.” 

For additional safekeeping, Faulkner established an oversight board referred to as “The Trust Protector Committee,” Epic mentioned, consisting of 3 health-care leaders — all Epic customers. Its activity is to sue contributors of the believe’s balloting committee in the event that they don’t observe the foundations. 

The names of contributors of the balloting committee and oversight board gained’t be excepted, Faulkner informed CNBC, however she mentioned she’s known who she wish to take part. 

Next working Epic for the month 46 years, Faulkner has accrued her fair proportion of admirers and critics, with some within the ultimate camp even taking Epic to court.

But Faulkner continues to flout conventional business practices and has built Epic, despite its flaws and complexities, into the most powerful technology company in U.S. health care. 

Reflecting on her approach to leadership and decision-making, Faulkner said, “Just have the guts to do what you know is the right thing to do.” 

CNBC spoke with two dozen Epic customers, former Epic employees, industry experts and people close to Faulkner for this article, some of whom asked not to be named in order to speak freely. Details about Faulkner’s personal, educational and professional history were obtained from Faulkner directly, her Epic website testimonials, Epic, obituaries, news reports and publicly available records.

Faulkner and her two siblings grew up in Erlton, New Jersey, now a part of Cherry Hill. Her father, Louis Greenfield, was an independent pharmacist who ran his own store, complete with a soda fountain. Her mother, Del Greenfield, was a peace activist who was involved with the South Jersey Peace Center and the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared in the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its work in preventing nuclear war. 

“Sometimes when I do something that’s tough, I think of my mother, who went to jail in her 80s for protesting at a nuclear arms site, and I think, ‘I’m my mother’s daughter,'” Faulkner said. 

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

Faulkner found out a love of math as a 7th grader, when her schoolteacher would let go puzzles at the blackboard every while, she mentioned in considered one of her testimonials, the cut tales and threads she stocks as soon as a era on Epic’s site. She earned her undergraduate level in math from Dickinson School in 1965.

Next studying how one can program all the way through a summer season activity, Faulkner upcoming enrolled within the College of Wisconsin–Madison’s nascent laptop science program and used to be in graduate school there till 1970.

At UW–Madison, Faulkner took a route about computing in medication that used to be taught by way of a pioneering doctor, Dr. Warner Slack, one of the most first crowd to acknowledge the pledge of the era inside fitness lend a hand.

Faulkner started running with Slack and his crew, and she or he used to be tasked with creating a machine that would conserve monitor of affected person knowledge over age. She in the end constructed what would grow to be the kernel for Epic, although it took years of urging from doable customers ahead of she would in truth creation the corporate in 1979. For the time being, she taught college-level laptop science.

When Faulkner after all opened Epic for industry, she did so with a petite sum of money from some colleagues at an preliminary valuation of $70,000. Now the corporate is virtue many billions of greenbacks, although estimates of its valuation range.

One of the latest shareholders in the end offered their store again to the corporate.

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

Faulkner has publicly described herself as “the accidental CEO.” 

She informed CNBC she learn books and took daylong or multiday classes to be informed extra about control, industry and management. However she didn’t all the time observe their recommendation. 

“I never got an MBA, which I think is a really good thing,” Faulkner mentioned. “They would have taught me, ‘Here’s how you do venture capital.’ We didn’t do it. ‘Here’s how you go public.’ We didn’t do it. ‘Here’s how you do budgets.’ We don’t have budgets. We say, if you need it, buy it. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it.”

On the corporate’s Customers Staff Assembly closing yr, Faulkner took the degree dressed as a swan, with a plume of feathers in her hair. Each UGM assembly has a theme — this one used to be “storytime.” In dress, Faulkner informed the hundreds of health-care executives in attendance about her aversion to the population marketplace. 

“Why be owned by people whose interest is primarily return of equity?” she mentioned. 

She’s similarly antagonistic to promoting the industry, which she makes cloudless within the corporate’s 2nd commandment.

That hasn’t prevented alternative executives from seeking to trade her thoughts.  

In 2017, on the Virtual Healthcare Innovation Top in Boston, former Basic Electrical CEO Jeff Immelt visible that he’d spoken with Faulkner about obtaining Epic.

Faulkner close him ailing in an instant.

“It was a five-minute meeting — perhaps the shortest in history,” Immelt mentioned, in line with a record from Healthcare IT News. The record mentioned he’d additionally regarded as purchasing Cerner.

Faulkner showed the come across with CNBC.

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

Faulkner has mentioned in testimonials that she’s have shyed away from consumers to bring to stay isolated and saving Epic’s distinctive tradition, and she or he doesn’t put together acquisitions, calling them a distraction.

However regardless of how a lot she loves her corporate and her activity, some time, someone else goes to need to run Epic.

Faulkner has remained mum about who will probably be her eventual successor, alternative than to mention that the individual must be a instrument developer and an established Epic worker.

The observable selection, in line with 10 former Epic workers who spoke with CNBC, is Sumit Rana, who used to be named president of the corporate closing August. The 49-year-old joined Epic proper out of faculty in 1998 and helped form the corporate’s affected person portal referred to as MyChart. 

Rana, who used to be a baby when Faulkner based Epic, has been taking part in additional high-profile talking engagements of overdue, together with representing the corporate all the way through the hole panel on the Facilities for Medicare & Medicaid Products and services’ Attribute Convention in July.

Faulkner declined to mention whether or not Rana is the lead contender for the activity. 

“That’s the company’s business,” she mentioned. “Sumit is a wonderful employee, and he would make a good CEO, but we’re not publicly announcing anything.”

Year Faulkner doesn’t say a lot concerning the corporate’s succession plans, she hasn’t been shy about her plans for her private wealth.

In 2015, she signed The Giving Pledge and correct to donate 99% of her property to fund, a choice that used to be impressed partially by way of a dinner she had with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett that yr.

Buffett created The Giving Word of honour with Invoice Gates and Gates’ upcoming spouse, Melinda French Gates, in 2010, encouraging the arena’s richest crowd to offer away nearly all of their wealth. 

Following Faulkner’s word of honour, she introduced a people foot referred to as Roots & Wings together with her husband in 2020. Roots & Wings supplies grants to nonprofits that help low-income kids and households. Faulkner’s daughter, Shana Dall’Osto, serves as govt director of the group. 

Faulkner has been promoting her nonvoting stocks again to the corporate, giving the proceeds without delay to Roots & Wings. 

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

Putting in an EHR is an especially sophisticated and dear mission for fitness techniques. If it doesn’t exit smartly, it might “blow up” the entire industry, Dr. Robert Grossman, CEO of NYU Langone Fitness, informed CNBC in an interview. 

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

Lovers of Epic say the corporate is totally tuned in to its consumers’ wishes.

“They don’t just operate and dial in,” mentioned Michael Mayo, CEO of ​​Baptist Fitness 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 are in our facilities. And when we went live, which is a pretty scary time, they were in full force here.”

Every fitness machine that makes use of Epic has some degree individual referred to as a “BFF,” or “best friend forever,” who’s to be had to respond to questions and support resolve issues. Epic doesn’t outsource any incoming yells to 3rd events, the corporate says, so team of workers contributors are accountable for selecting up the telephone 24/7.

Faulkner additionally makes herself simply available to consumers, executives mentioned.

Mike Slubowski, CEO of Trinity Fitness, which operates 93 hospitals throughout 26 states, mentioned Faulkner all the time solutions his emails inside the while, if now not the past. 

She holds ordinary conferences with senior health-care executives by way of telephone or video name to respond to questions and communicate via a company’s particular wishes and concepts. Executives informed CNBC that Faulkner takes copious notes and is receptive to comments. If she doesn’t have a solution, she promptly yells any person who does. 

“She’ll stop right there and say, ‘Get so-and-so on the phone,'” mentioned Dickson, of UMass Memorial Fitness. “I don’t know what so-and-so was doing prior to getting the call, but it’s clear that when Judy calls, you drop what you’re doing.”

Pete Durlach, company vp for fitness and existence sciences at Microsoft, said he’s been in meetings with Epic staffers who have gotten these impromptu calls. Microsoft and Epic have been close partners for around two decades, a relationship that’s gotten tighter as cloud and artificial intelligence technologies have advanced, he said. 

“People definitely answer the phone when Judy calls,” Durlach said.

Epic doesn’t advertise or have a traditional marketing department; the company has relied heavily on word of mouth. Faulkner has also proven to be an effective salesperson. 

Ardent Health CEO Marty Bonick said that when he was debating whether to convert some of his hospitals to using Epic products, Faulkner ultimately helped sway him.

Ardent Health owns 30 hospitals and 280 outpatient care sites across six states. When Bonick joined Ardent in 2020, he said, roughly two-thirds of Ardent’s hospitals were using Epic. Bonick said he’d never worked with Epic and wanted to make sure that switching over the remainder of Ardent’s hospitals would be worthwhile. 

Bonick said he told Faulkner that he’d heard Epic’s product was expensive and difficult to implement.

“She came back with a presentation that she delivered personally, and spent probably over 90 minutes,” said Bonick, who was ultimately sold on the conversion. “I had to say, ‘OK, time out. I’ve got another meeting to go to,’ but she really was not watching the clock.”

Epic is used by all 20 of the top hospitals from the U.S. News & World Report rankings, and by the country’s seven largest health plans, according to the company.

Its dominance has come with plenty of controversy. 

Epic faces accusations of anticompetitive practices in two lawsuits from the past year. One was filed in September by data startup Particle Health, which alleges that Epic has worn its EHR marketplace energy to “snuff out” pageant in alternative rising health-care markets.

Epic mentioned in reaction it will “vigorously defend itself against Particle’s meritless claims.”

The second one lawsuit used to be filed in Would possibly by way of CureIS Healthcare, a controlled lend a hand services and products corporate that says Epic has swamped in a “multi-prong scheme to destroy” CureIS’ industry. CureIS alleges Epic has interfered with its buyer relationships, cancelled get entry to to essential information and raised unfounded safety issues, in line with a grievance.

An Epic spokesperson informed CNBC on the age of the submitting that the corporate “believes in free and fair competition, and we also believe our customers are in the best position to choose the right solutions to meet their needs — whether with Epic or by adopting other products and services.” 

Epic’s competition have additionally lengthy accused the corporate of being territorial over its information and impeding efforts to proportion affected person knowledge between distributors. 

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

Interoperability, on this case, refers back to the trade of digital fitness information from one health-care group to any other. Since fitness information is siloed, saved throughout dozens of codecs and secure by way of federal rules such because the Fitness Insurance coverage Portability and Duty Occupation, or HIPAA, it’s a posh enterprise.

Through the years, startups akin to Apply Fusion and DrChrono have attempted to fracture the EHR marketplace with guarantees of better openness and extra user-friendly merchandise, however they have got by no means grow to be greater than area of interest choices. Some failed totally.  

Epic promotes its personal interoperability equipment akin to Support Far and wide and EpicCare Hyperlink, which permits consumers and their associates to replace information with one any other. Epic additionally participates in better information trade networks.

Considered one of Epic’s largest feats in its 46 years is managing to draw high-level tech ability some distance clear of the family’s engineering and industry hubs, particularly given the cruel Midwestern winters in Wisconsin. 

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

All 28 office buildings are themed. They’re clustered into mini-campuses, with names such as Prairie Campus, Wizards Academy Campus and Storybook Campus. 

The offices are designed by architecture firm Cuningham, which has also worked on projects at Disney theme parks all over the world. John Cuningham, the founder of the firm, said he’s worked with Faulkner for 30 years, and that she’s always been very involved in the process. 

Epic’s first campus, for instance, has more than 80 bathrooms, and Faulkner wanted to know the details of all of them. 

“Each one,” he said. “Light fixtures, faucets, mirrors, wallpaper, tile, sinks. I mean, I was thinking, ‘Oh, she’ll last for 10.’ She did all 85, and she still does that,” he said. 

On Epic’s grounds, a metal wizard stands in the courtyard of a castle, giant chocolate chips mark the entryway to a faux chocolate factory, and a hanging bridge leads to the company’s very own treehouse. 

Inside a building inspired by “Alice in Wonderland,” there’s a slide that takes employees into a small room where everything is upside down. It’s popular with visitors. 

“I was kind of blown away,” Warner Thomas, CEO of Sutter Health, a nonprofit health system in Northern California, told CNBC about his first trip to Epic’s campus. “I went down the slide, like everybody.”

The buildings are brimming with trinkets, ceramics, mosaics and paintings that Epic employees get to help source. Faulkner recruits a small group of volunteers to go with her to local art fairs and buy decorations for the campus. Some pieces cost thousands of dollars, according to former employees.  

Faulkner said she had just returned from an art fair ahead of her interview with CNBC.

Despite the fantastical themes on-site, employees are tasked with very real responsibilities. Since Faulkner places such a strong emphasis on supporting her customers, she holds her staff to high standards. 

Most employees work in person five days a week. Hours can be long and burnout is common, former employees say. In June, The Economist analyzed 900 firms throughout 19 industries, and located that Epic had the worst work-life steadiness within the instrument and IT services and products division. A number of former workers informed CNBC their business at Epic used to be all-consuming. 

Epic mentioned the common worker works between 44 and 45 hours a era, in line with per month age sheet submissions between June 2024 and June 2025. The corporate mentioned its surrender fee closing yr used to be 7%.

“People at Epic are dedicated and work hard,” an Epic spokesperson mentioned in a remark.

Epic employees are entrusted with fat tasks, anticipated to have interaction without delay with consumers and normally tackle a dozen of duty. For some workers, that incorporates running along hospitals as they put into effect Epic’s era.

“Some of these implementations really sucked,” mentioned Brendan Keeler, a former Epic worker who continuously blogs concerning the corporate on-line. “So much of the success of an implementation was just a function of the politics of the hospital.”

Epic recruits the giant majority of its workers immediately out of faculty, so its team of workers is fairly younger. All fresh staffers exit via intensive coaching, together with a five-hour company philosophy elegance the place they’re taught how one can be a a hit worker.

Faulkner mentioned she worn to show the category by way of herself however that she now has support from one or two alternative crowd.

Faulkner’s affect is found in each nook of Epic’s campus, in its product and throughout a lot of the health-care trade.

“Everybody knows Judy Faulkner,” mentioned Thomas, of Sutter Fitness. 

She’s nonetheless were given a dozen to do. The health-care trade is reckoning with emerging prices, staffing shortages, the affect of AI and the Trump management’s hefty cuts within the disciplines of scientific science and analysis. 

And Faulkner isn’t able to leave.

“It’s interesting and it’s challenging and it’s worthwhile,” Faulkner mentioned.

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