Journey to the mythical and vast Epic Systems campus, a world away from Wall Street – NBC Los Angeles

• Epic Systems, a market leader in electronic health records software, is one of the largest privately held technology companies in the U.S., with annual revenue of approximately $5 billion.
• The company is headquartered in the small town of Verona, Wisconsin. Its 1,670-acre campus features science fiction-themed buildings.
• In late August, a CNBC crew visited the company’s premises during its annual user meetup, which is attended by thousands of industry representatives.

Dorothy Gale was right—the Land of Oz is not in Kansas. Instead, it is nestled in 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 fancy, sprawling 1,670-acre headquarters of Epic Systems, one of America’s largest privately held technology companies. Epic’s software is apparently ubiquitous in hospitals and clinics, storing the medical records of more than 280 million people in the U.S.

While the company’s employees are charged with creating tools that help doctors and nurses care for patients, Epic employees spend their days wandering around offices that look like they came straight out of a science fiction novel or a 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 entrance to a chocolate factory, and a mischievous cat grins through a window of a building guarded by life-size playing cards.

Last week, thousands of health care executives descended on Epic’s sprawling campus for its annual Users Group Meeting, in part to hear about new products and upcoming initiatives. This year’s theme was “story time,” and Judy Faulkner, the company’s 81-year-old CEO, took the stage dressed as a swan, with a plume of feathers in her hair.

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

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

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

The 14,000-person company keeps to no budget, has made no acquisitions and has never taken a venture capital investment. According to its website, it abides by its own set of Ten Commandments, the first of which is “don’t go public.”

Epic generated $4.9 billion in revenue last year. Cerner, Epic’s main rival in the electronic health records market, went public in 1986 and was acquired by Oracle in 2022 for more than $28 billion. Cerner generated $5.9 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023, according to Oracle’s financials.

The S&P 500 subindex of software and services companies trades at 9 times revenue. At an average valuation, Epic would be valued at about $45 billion.

Faulkner isn’t concerned about a score like Cerner’s. Epic’s second commandment is, after all, “don’t let yourself be conquered.”

“Why be owned by people whose primary interest is the return of capital?” Faulkner said on stage last week.

Touring Epic’s campus, it’s clear that the company exists somewhere else than Wall Street.

Each of Epic’s 28 office buildings has a theme. 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 become more ornate over the years, which required some haggling with architects, according to Epic’s website.

The conference room chairs match the buildings’ intricate motifs. And while the dinosaurs, armor, and working carousel on campus are fun to watch, they also have their uses. Faulkner says her plan was to create a welcoming environment that could attract and inspire talent, while also giving employees 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 his testimony. “These attributes help us hire the best people we can. That helps us be more productive.”

Faulkner argues that individual offices should be available to any employee who wants one. Because the vast majority of a company’s employees report to headquarters every day, some people end up duplicating themselves because hiring often outpaces construction.

Those looking to escape the office altogether can hop on one of the company’s 600 cow-track bikes and head to a treehouse meeting, zip down a water slide or grab lunch in a train car.

The universe underground

Epic’s address gives the first hint of the company’s existence in the afterlife. The company is located in 1979 Milky Way, a nod to its founding date and Faulkner’s fondness for celestial themes.

Visitors are greeted by a sign that reads “Epic Intergalactic Headquarters” as they travel along a road that winds between buildings and vast fields of greenery. About 750 acres of the Epic campus are working farmland, home to 42 sheep, 14 cows and a donkey.

Most of the company’s parking lots are underground, which helps the campus maintain its impressive appearance from above. It also means employees don’t have to worry about scraping snow or ice off their cars during the frigid Midwestern winters.

Even when they’re not parking, employees are no strangers to the underground. The campus buildings are connected by a network of tunnels and enclosed walkways, so people don’t have to go outside to get between them.

Employees are also required to attend monthly staff meetings in an underground auditorium called Deep Space. The meetings last about two hours, with employees presenting projects and discussing industry trends.

They always include a grammar lesson, Faulkner said at a Users Group meeting in the auditorium, which opened in 2013 and seats about 11,400. The room is an engineering feat because it has no pillars holding it up.

To get to Deep Space, visitors must descend through the levels of 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 ominously scrawled on the wall in large, glowing red letters.

Sci-fi references are everywhere. There’s a coffee shop 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 takes clear inspiration from “Harry Potter,” and has its own King’s Cross train station, a giant chess set, and a collection of unruly portraits.

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

While each office building has its own unique theme, the skeleton of the physical structures is very similar. Long corridors of offices are interrupted by the occasional conference room, and most buildings are no more than three stories tall, a design choice Faulkner says was intended to promote in-person meetings.

On Prairie Campus, home to Epic’s oldest offices, buildings are named after celestial bodies, such as stars, planets and galaxies.

On Storybook Campus, the Mystery building looks like an old mansion where you could easily imagine Sherlock Holmes walking the halls. The Castaway building resembles a ship, with an interior full of nautical décor.

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

Wandering around the user group meeting space, it was easy to forget that Epic is a software company.

But beyond its fancy campus, doctors and their patients have very real needs from this massive technology provider. And there are some very real critics.

For years, Epic has been accused of lagging behind on interoperability efforts that would streamline the exchange of patient information between providers.

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

Oracle, now Epic’s main rival, says Epic is fiercely protective of its turf. In a May blog post, Oracle 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 recently been helping the federal government establish a data-sharing network called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, that aims to refine both the legal and technical requirements for sharing patient data on a large scale. Epic said last month that it plans to migrate all of its customers to TEFCA by the end of next year.

However, the company still plans to use its vast proprietary network. At its Users Group meeting, Epic announced a series of new generative AI features for its Cosmos platform, which is an anonymized collection of patient data that doctors can use to support treatment and research.

Seth Hain, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, spoke to reporters after speaking in a conference room decorated like a box. Hain had just given the audience a powerful demonstration in which an AI agent assessed his recovery from supposed wrist surgery, referencing data from Cosmos.

He added that such tools could be ready within a few years.

“Technology is moving very quickly,” Hain said.

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