NEWSPAPER

Dorothy Gale was right — the Land of Oz is not in Kansas. Rather, it’s nestled within the rolling green fields of Verona, Wisconsin, a town of nearly 16,400 people located about 10 miles southwest of the capital city of Madison.

Verona is home to the whimsical, sprawling 1,670-acre headquarters for Epic Systems, one of the biggest privately held U.S. tech companies. Epic’s software is seemingly ubiquitous across hospitals and clinics, storing the medical records of more than 280 million people in the U.S.

While the company’s workforce is tasked with the hefty responsibility of building tools to support doctors and nurses as they provide care to patients, Epic employees spend their days milling in and out of offices that look as if they were plucked straight from the pages of a sci-fi novel or children’s book.

A yellow brick road inspired by “The Wizard of Oz” winds through the hallways of a gleaming, emerald green building. Giant chocolate chips mark the entryway 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 health-care executives descended on Epic’s sprawling campus for the company’s annual Users Group Meeting, in part to hear about new products and upcoming initiatives. This year’s theme was “storytime,” and Judy Faulkner, the company’s 81-year-old CEO, took the stage dressed as a swan, complete 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 upkeep account for 8% of the company’s total expenses. But she made the obvious point, that it’s a lot 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 active sci-fi readers,” Faulkner said during her keynote. 

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

The company, with its 14,000-person workforce, doesn’t follow a preordained budget, has made zero acquisitions and never accepted any investment from venture capitalists. It abides by its own set of Ten Commandments, according to its website, the first of which is, “do not go public.”

Epic generated revenue last year of $4.9 billion. Cerner, Epic’s top 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’s financials, Cerner contributed $5.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023.

The S&P 500’s sub-index of software and services companies trades for 9 times revenue. At the average, that would give Epic a valuation of roughly $45 billion.

Faulkner doesn’t care for a Cerner-like outcome. Epic’s second commandment, after all, is “do not be acquired.”

“Why be owned by people whose interest is primarily return of equity?” Faulkner said onstage last week.

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

Each of Epic’s 28 office building is themed. They’re clustered into 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 necessitated some haggling with architects, according to Epic’s website.

Conference room chairs match their buildings’ intricate themes. And while the campus’ dinosaurs, suits of armor and its functioning carousel are fun to observe, they also serve a purpose. Faulkner says her plan was to build a friendly environment that could attract and inspire talent and to ensure that her employees have the quiet space they need to be productive, according to a series of testimonials on Epic’s website.  

“We compete with big tech,” Faulkner said in a testimonial. “These attributes help us hire the best staff possible. That helps us be more productive.”

Faulkner says individual offices should be available to every worker who wants one. With the vast majority of the company’s workforce showing up daily to headquarters, some people double up, since hiring often outpaces construction.

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

A universe underground

Epic’s address provides the first clue of its netherworld existence. The company is located at 1979 Milky Way, a nod to the date of its inception and Faulkner’s affinity for a celestial theme.

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

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

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

Employees are also required to attend a monthly staff meeting in an underground auditorium called Deep Space. The meetings last for around two hours, and employees present projects and discuss industry trends.

They always include a grammar lesson, too, Faulkner told the Users Group Meeting in the auditorium, which opened in 2013 and can seat around 11,400 people. The room is a feat of engineering, as there are no pillars holding it up.

To get to Deep Space, visitors must descend through levels of the Earth. The different levels of the building are named 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 scrawled ominously on the wall in giant, glowing red letters.   

Sci-fi references are everywhere. There’s a cafeteria called 42, which is the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything in the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The Wizards Academy Campus draws clear inspiration from “Harry Potter,” and has its own King’s Cross train station, giant chess set and collection of unruly portraits.  

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

Though each office building sports its own unique theme, the skeleton of the physical structures are all very similar. Long hallways of offices are broken up by the occasional conference room, and most buildings are no more than three stories tall, a design choice that Faulkner says is intended to promote in-person meetings.

The Prairie Campus, home to the oldest offices at Epic, has buildings named after celestial bodies like stars, planets and galaxies.  

On the Storybook Campus, the building called Mystery looks like an old mansion, where one could easily imagine Sherlock Holmes wandering 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 displayed at every turn.

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

However, on the outside of its fantasy campus, medical professionals and their patients have very real-world needs from this massive technology vendor. And there are plenty of very real critics.

Epic has for years been accused of dragging its feet around interoperability efforts that would help streamline the exchange of patient information between vendors.

Health-care data in the U.S. has historically been siloed and difficult to move around, as clinics, hospitals and health systems can store their information in a variety of formats across dozens of different vendors. The data is also protected by federal laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.

Oracle, which is now Epic’s chief rival, says Epic is fiercely protective over its turf. In a May blog post, Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck wrote that “everyone in the industry understands that Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner is the single biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability.”

Epic has of late been helping the federal government establish a data exchange network called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, which aims to iron out both the legal and technical requirements for sharing patients’ data at scale. Epic said last month that it’s planning on moving all of its customers to TEFCA by the end of next year.

But the company still plans to use its extensive proprietary network. At its Users Group Meeting, Epic announced a number of new generative artificial intelligence features for its Cosmos platform, which is a deidentified 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 meeting room decorated like a lodge. Hain had just presented a lofty demo to the audience where an AI agent evaluated his recovery after a supposed wrist surgery by cross-referencing data from Cosmos.

He said these sorts of tools could be ready in as soon as a few years.

“The technology is progressing very rapidly,” Hain said.

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