Judy Faulkner

Judy Faulkner is founder and chief executive of Epic Systems, the private company in Verona, Wisconsin, just southwest of Madison, whose electronic health record holds the medical information of more than half of the people in the United States. She started it in 1979 in a Madison basement with $70,000 and two part-time assistants, and she has spent the decades since keeping it away from venture capital, public shareholders, and buyers.

Growing Up in New Jersey

"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,'" she said in 2025. Her mother, Del Greenfield, was a peace activist with the South Jersey Peace Center and Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility.

She grew up with two siblings in Erlton, a neighborhood now part of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where her father, Louis Greenfield, ran his own pharmacy with a soda fountain. A seventh-grade teacher who left puzzles on the blackboard each day gave her a love of math. She graduated from Moorestown Friends School in 1961 and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Dickinson College in 1965.

Learning to Program

A summer job taught her to program, and she enrolled in the young computer science program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she finished her master's in 1967. There she took a course on computing in medicine from Warner Slack, a physician who was among the first to see what computers could do for care. Slack's team asked her to build a system that tracked a patient's information over time. That database, organized around the patient, became the kernel of Epic.

Founding Epic

She did not start a company right away. Potential users urged her for years while she taught college computer science. In 1979 she and John Greist opened Human Services Computing, later renamed Epic, in a basement at 2020 University Avenue in Madison, with $70,000 in startup money and two part-time assistants.

She learned management from books and short courses and then ignored much of what they taught. "I never got an MBA, which I think is a really good thing," she said. "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."

Epic counts 3,300 hospitals and 71,000 clinics among its users, and 325 million patients worldwide. It has no traditional marketing department and grows by word of mouth, and it has never bought another company.

Keeping Epic Private

"Why be owned by people whose interest is primarily return of equity?" she asked in 2025. She came to her view of the public market after studying public companies and reading their shareholder comments, which she found vitriolic. Jeff Immelt, who led General Electric, said in 2017 that he had talked with her about buying Epic. She has turned buyers away to keep the company independent and protect its culture.

Its reach has drawn critics. Competitors have long accused Epic of guarding its data and slowing the exchange of patient records between vendors, and in 2024 and 2025 two companies sued it, accusing it of anticompetitive practices.

Planning for Succession

She has never sold any of her voting shares, and after her death they will pass into a trust. A committee of her husband, her three children, and five longtime Epic employees will vote those shares, and its rules bar it from taking the company public or selling it. A separate Trust Protector Committee of three health care leaders, all Epic customers, can sue committee members who break those rules.

She has said her successor must be a software developer and a longtime Epic employee. Sumit Rana, who joined out of college in 1998 and helped build the MyChart patient portal, became Epic's president in August 2024. "Sumit is a wonderful employee, and he would make a good CEO, but we're not publicly announcing anything," she said.

Signing the Giving Pledge

In 2015 she signed the Giving Pledge and committed 99 percent of her assets to philanthropy. With her husband she started the Roots & Wings Foundation, which gives grants to nonprofits that support low-income children and families. Their daughter, Shana Dall'Osto, is its executive director.

Home Life in Madison

She lives in Madison with her husband, Gordon Faulkner, a retired pediatrician, and they have three children. Her trust documents even recommend classical hold music for its phone line. "I like classical music," she said. "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."

Links

• Organization
• Wikipedia

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