Judy Faulkner

In the early 1970s, Judy Faulkner was a graduate student in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison when she enrolled in what she later described as probably the world's first class on computers and medicine, taught by Dr. Warner Slack¹. Slack had spent years pushing a radical idea: that computerized records could give patients — and doctors — far more control over clinical information than the paper files stacked in hospital corridors, written in handwriting so cramped that, as Faulkner once noted, one prescription was rejected because the writing was too legible¹. When Slack asked her to work with his team, she said yes without hesitation. She was a mathematician who thought programming was fun. She had no idea she was being recruited into a mission that would, four decades later, hold the health records of more than 325 million people².

Faulkner had arrived at UW-Madison with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Dickinson College³ and a mind that moved naturally between logic and experimentation. In the early 1970s, she began working with a physicians' group at the university to build a database for tracking patient clinical information over time — a task that meant confronting, department by department, the complete absence of shared data: psychiatry had its files, OB-GYN had its own, rehab medicine had another. Nobody's records talked to anyone else's. By 1976, at the recommendation of a professor, she committed to writing the code that would eventually become Epic⁴. When she later described what drove that decision, she kept it plain: 'I was young, I didn't know it was hard. So I said sure, and I figured it out.'⁵

In 1979, shortly after receiving her master's degree, Faulkner co-founded Human Services Computing with Dr. John Greist in the basement of an apartment building at 2020 University Avenue in Madison, Wisconsin³. The startup capital was $70,000 raised from friends and family³. Her early equipment was a single Data General Eclipse 16-bit minicomputer, roughly the size of a washer-dryer⁶. The company's first software modeled something the existing healthcare market barely attempted: a single, longitudinal record that followed a patient across time and across departments. Greist soon pushed for venture capital to accelerate growth. Faulkner refused. He eventually sold his shares and left. She held on to hers and kept building — without ever taking outside investment, making an acquisition, or entertaining a sale.

The break that transformed Epic from a regional software shop into an industry force came in 2003. Kaiser Permanente, the Oakland-based healthcare giant with 8.4 million members⁷, was shopping for a single unified electronic health records system after a failed attempt with IBM. Epic, which had roughly $50 million in annual revenue at the time⁸, competed head-to-head against Cerner, a far larger rival. Faulkner pushed a single-system approach rather than splitting the project across platforms. Epic won what the company described as its largest contract ever — an agreement to supply software for 30 hospitals, 423 medical offices, and more than 11,000 physicians⁷. The deal was part of Kaiser's $1.8 billion effort to digitize patient records⁷, and it catapulted Epic's annual revenue to approximately $162 million⁸. Kaiser's CIO later resigned amid cost concerns, and the rollout was turbulent, but Epic emerged with a reference client that every major health system in the country was watching. When Congress passed the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and authorized up to $27 billion in incentive payments for providers adopting electronic health records⁷, Epic was already positioned as the dominant integrated system. The growth that followed was, in the words of one observer, explosive.

Faulkner is now 82 and still shows up every day. Epic, which she renamed from Human Services Computing in 1983¹¹ to reflect the narrative arc of a patient's life, generated $5.7 billion in revenue in 2024² and employs roughly 14,000 people on a 1,670-acre campus in Verona, Wisconsin⁹ — themed buildings styled after Harry Potter, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz — making it one of the largest employers in Dane County². In 2013, Forbes called her 'the most powerful woman in healthcare.' Her net worth as of mid-2024 was estimated at $7.8 billion³, nearly all of it tied to her stake in the company she has never taken public. In 2015, she signed the Giving Pledge, committing 99 percent of her assets to philanthropy³. She sells around $100 million of her Epic shares back to the company each year², and has said she has never cashed a single share for herself⁹. The proceeds flow directly to the Roots & Wings Foundation, established in 2019, which in 2025 made $84.5 million in grants to more than 300 organizations¹⁰. The governance structure she built prohibits a public sale or acquisition of Epic after her death. Sumit Rana, named president in 2024, is widely expected to succeed her⁹ — but the company Faulkner built in a Madison basement, on $70,000 and a conviction about integrated data, will remain private, ungoverned by shareholders, and pointed at the same target she identified in Warner Slack's classroom more than half a century ago.