Profile of Epic Systems, a privately held healthcare software company based in Wisconsin that claims to hold medical records for more than 50% of US patients
@nytimes http://www.nytimes.com/... Jess Shull / @jgshull : Epic is poorly designed. Full stop. It still carries code from 1979?? And seeing an open heart surgery is NOT the same as using the EHR software. Epic employees should be required to find information on a patient from 2002, from a clinic in Alabama. http://twitter.com/... Joyce Novacek Ragard / @joycenovacek : I worked at Epic for 3.5 yrs & I think the way Epic treats its (thousands of) employees deserves more attention. The turnover rate for non-developers is ridiculous. I felt thrown into the fire, and since I was 22 and it was my first job, I didn't know I deserved better. Joyce Novacek Ragard / @joycenovacek : As an employee, the monthly staff meetings were a consistent impediment to me getting work done. And rumor has it that underground auditorium cost $600 million. It must be asked: is this a responsible use of healthcare money? Kate Kelly / @katekelly : A slide down from Heaven, an elevator to Hell, an Indiana Jones tunnel and hundreds of millions of patient medical records. My journey to Verona, Wisconsin to meet the most important tech company you've never heard of http://www.nytimes.com/... Christina Farr / @chrissyfarr : I wish I had written this -> “Epic's coders often leave campus to embed in operating and recovery rooms, where they watch nurses ripping the tops off blood bags and surgeons opening up people's chest cavities...(Some) faint at the sight of beating hearts.” http://www.nytimes.com/... Chris Dwan / @fdmts : Epic's outright hostility to software interoperability, coupled with their 1970s style monolithic mainframe style data design are a big part of why precision and personalized medicine are so slow to arrive. But hey! A whimsical campus! http://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimes : Epic's headquarters is full of childish whimsy. It's also a health care services provider with $2.7 billion in annual revenue. Is this the indulgence of an oddball founder, or a better way to run an IT company? http://www.nytimes.com/... Dr. David T. Macknet / @david_t_macknet : “All employees have offices, because studies show that workers in open floor plans get interrupted frequently.” http://www.nytimes.com/... @indievc : A rare look behind the curtain at Epic Systems. Bootstrapped to nearly $3B in revenue in one of the most capital intensive, competitive and regulated industries on the planet. With a company mandate to always remain private. http://www.nytimes.com/... Farzad Mostashari / @farzad_md : Cute article about Epic the EHR company, and their quirky campus, but this excuse for lack of information sharing (we don't have technical standards) is nonsense The problem is perverse incentives of vendors and hospitals, not lack of technical standards http://www.nytimes.com/... http://twitter.com/... Steve Case / @stevecase : Willy Wonka and the Medical Software Factory http://www.nytimes.com/... “In the farm country of southern Wisconsin, 12 miles from Madison, is one of the nation's biggest tech companies — and almost certainly the quirkiest” #RiseOfRest http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This New York Times profile lands at the midpoint of a decade-long argument about Epic Systems. The interoperability gap that has hobbled doctors since at least 2015 frames the piece's central tension: a company holding records for more than half of US patients, on a monolithic design critics say contains legacy code, while staying deliberately private on a whimsical Wisconsin campus.
The profile also surfaces the human layer — high turnover among non-developers, coders embedded in operating rooms — that the coverage treats as inseparable from the product. What came next in the corpus validates the stakes: the $36B federal digitization push was later tied to patient-safety reports, and Epic mobilized large hospitals against proposed rules opening access to patient records, with a 2025 profile of CEO Judy Faulkner confirming the private, founder-led model persists.
First-order effects
- Epic's hospital customers — the health systems whose records make up that 50% share — face renewed public scrutiny of whether a closed, monolithic EHR serves clinical workflows or constrains them.
- Former employees' accounts of non-developer turnover and the $600M campus spending put Epic's internal culture, not just its software, on the record for the first time at this scale.
Second-order effects
- The interoperability criticism sharpens into a policy fight: within a year of this profile, Epic is lobbying large hospitals to oppose proposed US rules that would open patient records, forcing regulators and rivals to respond to its market weight.
- Competing EHR vendors and health-data startups gain an argument for open, modular designs, positioning themselves against Epic's monolithic data model in hospital procurement decisions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — dominant private vendor, closed data design, resistance to access mandates — EHR data portability becomes a regulatory question rather than a market one, with Epic's 50% share making it the de facto counterparty for any national interoperability regime.
- Epic's refusal to go public, sustained across Faulkner's multi-decade tenure, points toward a healthcare software market where the largest player answers to no outside investors, concentrating both data and strategic control in Verona, Wisconsin.
The trend: US health records are consolidating around one privately held vendor whose closed design and lobbying against open-access rules are pushing interoperability from a technical debate into a regulatory one.