Inside the fabled campus of Epic Systems, a world away from Wall Street

Dorothy Gale was right — the Land of Oz is not in Kansas. Instead, it sits amid the rolling green fields of Verona, Wisconsin, a town of nearly 16,400 located about 10 miles southwest of the capital, Madison.

Verona is home to the quirky, sprawling 1,670-acre headquarters of Epic Systems, one of the largest privately held US technology companies. Epic’s software is seemingly ubiquitous in hospitals and clinics, storing the medical records of more than 280 million people in the US

While the company’s workforce is tasked with the heavy responsibility of building tools to support doctors and nurses as they provide patient care, Epic employees spend their days talking in and out of offices that look like they’ve been plucked straight from the science pages. -fi novel or children’s book.

A ‘Wizard of Oz’-inspired yellow brick road runs through the hallways of a gleaming, emerald green building. Giant chunks of chocolate mark the entrance to the chocolate factory, and a mischievous cat grins through the window of a building guarded by life-sized playing cards.

Last week, thousands of healthcare executives descended on Epic’s massive campus for the annual User group meetingin part to hear about new products and upcoming initiatives. This year’s theme was “storytime” and Judy Faulknerthe company’s 81-year-old chief executive took the stage dressed as a swan, with a plume of feathers in her hair.

Faulkner, a reserved mathematician who founded Epic in a basement in 1979, told the crowd that the surrounding buildings and their maintenance account for 8% of the company’s total expenses. But he stated the obvious, that it’s much cheaper for Epic to buy land and build in Verona than it would be in a tech hub like San Francisco, Seattle or New York. And in this small Midwestern town, the company is far from big-city distractions.

“Most of us in software development are avid readers of science fiction,” Faulkner said during her keynote address.

For public market investors, Epic has always been something of a fantasy.

The company, with a workforce of 14,000, does not follow a set budget, has made zero acquisitions and has never received any investment from venture capitalists. He abides by his own set of Ten Commandments, according to his website, the first of which is “do not publicize.”

Epic generated $4.9 billion in revenue last year. Cerner, Epic’s leading rival in the electronic medical records market, went public in 1986 and was acquired by Oracle in 2022 for over $28 billion. According to Oracle FinanceCerner contributed $5.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023.

The S&P 500’s indicator of software and services companies trades at 9 times revenue. On average, that would give Epic a valuation of around $45 billion.

Faulkner is not interested in a Cerner-like result. Epic’s second commandment, after all, is “don’t be acquired.”

“Why belong to people whose primary interest is returning equity?” Faulkner said on stage last week.

Touring Epic’s campus, it’s clear the company exists a universe away from Wall Street.

Each of Epic’s 28 office buildings has a theme. They are clustered in mini-campuses, with names like Prairie Campus, Farm Campus, Central Park Campus, Wizards Academy Campus, and Storybook Campus. The buildings have gotten more ornate over the years, which has required some haggling with architects, according to Epic’s website.

The conference room chairs match the complex themes of their buildings. And while her campus dinosaurs, armor, and working carousel are fun to look at, they also serve a purpose. Faulkner says her plan was to create a friendly environment that could attract and inspire talent and ensure her employees have the quiet space they need to be productive, according to a series of testimonials on Epic’s website .

“We’re fighting big technology,” Faulkner said in testimony. “These features help us hire the best possible staff. This helps us be more productive.”

Faulkner says individual offices should be available to any worker who wants them. With the vast majority of the company’s workforce showing up at headquarters every day, some people are doubling up as hiring often outstrips construction.

Those looking to escape the office entirely can hop on one of the company’s 600 cow bikes to take meetings from a treehouse, slide down a rabbit hole or grab lunch in a train car.

An underground universe

Epic’s address provides the first indication of its existence in the underworld. The company is located in 1979 Milky Way, a nod to its founding date and Faulkner’s affinity for a celestial subject.

Visitors are greeted by a sign that reads “Epic Intergalactic Headquarters” as they travel down a road that winds between buildings and vast green meadows. About 750 acres of Epic’s campus is active farmland with 42 sheep, 14 cows and one donkey.

The majority of the company’s parking structures are underground, which helps the campus maintain an impressive feel from above. It also means workers don’t have to worry about scraping snow or ice off their cars during the bitter Midwest winter.

Even when not parked, workers are no strangers to the underground. The campus buildings are connected by a network of tunnels and enclosed skyways so that people don’t have to go outside to travel between them.

Workers must also attend a monthly staff meeting in an underground auditorium called Deep Space. Meetings last about two hours and employees present projects and discuss industry trends.

They always include a grammar lesson, Faulkner said at the User Group Meeting at the auditorium, which opened in 2013 and can seat about 11,400 people. The room is a feat of engineering as there are no pillars to hold it up.

To reach Deep Space, visitors must descend to Earth levels. The different levels of the building are called Sky, Grass, Dirt, Rock, Magma and Core. The lobby outside the auditorium is inspired by The Lord of the Rings series, and the word “precious” is ominously etched on the wall in giant, glowing red letters.

Science fiction references are everywhere. There is a cafe called 42, which is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The Wizards Academy campus is clearly inspired by “Harry Potter” and has its own King’s Cross train station, giant chess set and collection of raunchy portraits.

Epic is building a brand new campus on the same grounds, inspired by epic fantasy like “Game of Thrones” and “Star Wars.” The cranes were decorated with huge kites that flew high above the campus during last week’s event.

Although each office building has its own unique theme, the skeleton of the physical structures are all very similar. Long corridors of offices break away from the occasional boardroom, and most buildings are no higher than three stories, a design choice that Faulkner says is meant to promote personal meetings.

The Prairie campus, home to Epic’s oldest offices, has buildings named after celestial bodies such as stars, planets, and galaxies.

In the Storybook Campus, the building called Mystery looks like an old mansion where one could easily imagine Sherlock Holmes roaming the halls. The Castaway building resembles a ship and its interior is full of nautical decor.

The walls in many of the buildings are decorated from floor to ceiling. Trinkets, ceramics, mosaics and paintings sourced from local artists are on display at every turn.

Wandering around the grounds during the User Group Meeting, it was easy to forget that Epic is a software company.

However, outside of the fantasy campus, healthcare professionals and their patients have very real needs from this massive technology vendor. And there are many true critics.

Epic has been accused for years of dragging its feet on interoperability efforts that would help streamline the sharing of patient information between providers.

Healthcare data in the US has historically been siled and difficult to move, as clinics, hospitals and health systems may store their information in various formats with dozens of different vendors. Data is also protected by federal laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

Oracle, which is now Epic’s main rival, says Epic is fiercely protective of its turf. In a May blog postOracle executive vice president Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone in the industry understands that Epic CEO Judy Faulkner is the single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability.”

Epic has in recent years helped the federal government create a data exchange network called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, which aims to eliminate both the legal and technical requirements for sharing patient data at scale. Epic said last month that it plans to move all of its customers to TEFCA by the end of next year.

But the company still plans to use its extensive proprietary network. At the Users Group Meeting, Epic announced a number of new AI generation capabilities for the Cosmos platform, which is an identified patient dataset that clinicians can use to support treatment and conduct research.

Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, spoke to reporters after the keynote in a conference room decorated like a bunker. Hayne had just given a great demo to the audience, where an AI agent assessed his recovery from a supposed wrist operation by cross-referencing data from Cosmos.

He said these kinds of tools could be ready in a few years.

“Technology is moving very quickly,” Hain said.

CLOCK: Artificial intelligence is disrupting the field of medical records