Corporate Climber: Faulkner says she didn’t have a grand plan for growth. “It’s always been, like, you climb a mountain. And you just see the hill ahead of you. You don’t see the whole mountain. And then you get on top of that hill, you see the next hill. And you just keep climbing.”
Image: Jamel Toppin for Forbes
A victorious swell of brass instruments reverberates across the 1,100-acre Epic Systems campus in Verona, Wisconsin, a sleepy suburb just outside Madison. It’s February 2020, and except for China and a couple of ill-fated cruise ships, there are few signs of the coronavirus pandemic that’s about to envelop the world. It’s certainly business as usual at Epic: The familiar strains of a baroque wedding march fill the hallways, stopping the health care software company’s 10,700 employees in their tracks. On cue, a new customer announcement follows: Florida-based AdventHealth plans to deploy Epic’s electronic health record system across 37 of its hospitals. The full installation will take over three years and cost around $650 million, not counting ongoing maintenance, which will cost millions more annually. “It’s a very long relationship for many of our customers,” says Epic’s founder and CEO Judy Faulkner in a rare interview. She got the idea for the wedding theme from a visit to the Mayo Clinic several decades earlier, where she heard lullabies play whenever a new baby was born. A new customer “didn’t feel like a new baby”, she says. “It felt more like a wedding.”
(This story appears in the 07 May, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)