Judith R. Faulkner

A summer research job required programming Judy Faulkner did not know, so she taught herself FORTRAN from a book in one week, having never before had access to a computer.¹ She wrote Epic's original code the same way, on $70,000 borrowed against friends' and family's homes, and has spent more than forty-five years refusing the venture capital, the IPO, and the acquisition offers that would have taken the company out of her hands.

Faulkner is the founder and chief executive of Epic Systems Corporation, a privately held company in Verona, Wisconsin that builds electronic health record software used by hospitals and health systems to manage patient records, scheduling, billing, and clinical workflows. Epic is the largest electronic health record vendor in the United States by market share and holds medical records for more than 325 million patients. Faulkner has led the company since founding it in 1979 and has never taken it public.

Background

Faulkner was born Judith Greenfield on August 11, 1943, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Her father, Louis Greenfield, was a pharmacist; her mother, Del Greenfield, directed Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, an affiliate of the group that later shared the Nobel Peace Prize as International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Faulkner has cited her mother as a major influence. She attended Moorestown Friends School, a Quaker institution she credits with instilling discipline and ethical reasoning, and developed an early interest in math and logic through blackboard riddles.

She majored in mathematics at Dickinson College. The summer research job that put her in front of a computer for the first time was at the University of Rochester, funded by the National Science Foundation, and by the end of it the principal investigator had published papers.¹ She applied to five PhD programs and was accepted to all; both Stanford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison redirected her application to their new computer science departments. She chose UW-Madison, then the second such program in the country, and earned a master's degree in computer science there in 1967. A course from Dr. Warner Slack, reputed to be the first ever offered on computers in medicine, shaped her thinking through its concept of computers interviewing patients directly. She married Gordon Faulkner, a Dickinson classmate who became a pediatrician; they had three children.

Getting started

Faulkner worked directly alongside clinicians building early medical computing tools, including a punch-card call-scheduling system for Dr. John Greist that produced an annual schedule in 18 seconds for five dollars. She observed that hospital databases of the era organized data around the institution, whether the hospital, department, or billing cycle, and reoriented the model around the patient as the organizing principle. That approach became PISAR, Patient Information Storage and Retrieval, the precursor to Epic's architecture.

In 1979 she co-founded the company, originally named Human Services Computing, Inc., with Greist, raising $70,000 from friends and family who borrowed against their homes.¹ It worked out of a purple-painted basement office at 2020 University Avenue in Madison, using a Data General Eclipse minicomputer. Faulkner wrote the original code herself and served as president. Early on she refused Greist's push to raise venture capital, arguing that investors focused on return on equity would conflict with product and employee priorities. Greist later conceded the point and left the board in 1983, the year the company was renamed Epic, a name suggested by board member Marjorie Klein.

What she built

Faulkner has never taken venture capital or private equity and has never taken Epic public across more than 45 years; it remains privately held, with Faulkner and her family owning roughly 43 percent. The company moved from Madison to a large campus in Verona in 2005, known for its fantasy-themed, castle-like buildings and a dining hall modeled on King's Cross Station.²

By the early-to-mid 2020s, Epic had roughly 13,000 employees and reported about $4.6 billion in revenue for 2022. Its systems held records for more than 325 million patients, its MyChart patient portal was used by roughly 150 million people in the United States, and most top-ranked US News hospitals ran Epic. Its de-identified research data warehouse, Cosmos, spanned records from roughly 296 million patients. The company operates international offices across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. Forbes estimated Faulkner's net worth at roughly $7.8 billion in July 2024.

How she operates

Faulkner stays closely involved in product decisions despite the company's scale, and Forbes described her in 2013 as the most powerful woman in healthcare that most people had never heard of.³ She chose a fantasy-styled campus over sleek corporate buildings, skipped a business degree, and rejects formal business attire, saying high heels hurt and stockings constrain thinking. She frames her conviction as following a fixed path, saying she thinks of it as the yellow brick road, that she can see it and knows how to step down it, while others may see it but question it. On avoiding outside investors, she has asked why a company would want people whose primary interest is return on equity rather than whether it is building a good product that helps people.³ Forty-five years without venture capital, an IPO, or a sale is what files her under Fanatical Owner-Operator, a plate that turns on a founder who admits no structure able to put another party's standard in charge of the product. Of starting out, she has said she was young and did not know it was hard.

Where things stand

Faulkner remains founder and chief executive, with the company still privately controlled and resisting acquisition and IPO pressure after more than 45 years, and no successor named. Epic faces mounting scrutiny alongside its dominance: implementation problems and patient-safety concerns have been cited in rollouts in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland, and Norway, where a government report found the system put patient lives at risk. The company faces antitrust suits from Particle Health and CureIS Healthcare and scrutiny from the Texas Attorney General, along with criticism that its design contributes to clinician burnout. Faulkner signed The Giving Pledge in 2015, committing 99 percent of her assets to philanthropy, and co-founded the Roots & Wings Foundation in 2019, focused on low-income children and families.

Key facts

• Founded Epic in 1979 on $70,000 borrowed against friends' and family's homes, working from a purple-painted basement and writing the code herself.
• Has run Epic as a private, venture-free, founder-controlled company for more than 45 years.
• Epic holds records for more than 325 million patients, and its Cosmos warehouse holds de-identified data on roughly 296 million.
• The Verona campus is a fantasy-themed complex with castle buildings and a King's Cross Station-style dining hall.
• Epic's headquarters address, 1979 Milky Way, encodes the company's founding year.