VERONA — It’s not that Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner tries to buck convention. She just thinks her way is probably best.

In the 1980s, when other technology companies were choosing sleek, modern buildings as offices, Faulkner picked an old Victorian home.

When other young startups grew with venture capital and Faulkner was advised to seek some too, she declined. At a time when other entrepreneurs sought business degrees to help run their companies, Faulkner passed.

And when other business people wore suits, heels, ties, stockings, Faulkner, the head of the Verona-based electronic health records giant, opted for comfort.

“High heels hurt. Stockings — stockings are probably like ties. They constrain your thinking,” Faulkner said, in a recent interview with the Cap Times at Epic’s headquarters.“So a lot of it was just like, ‘I can't work this way’ rather than much thinking about defying tradition.”

Read the full transcript of the Cap Times' interview with Faulkner.

Faulkner, 73, trusts herself. She has a resolute fidelity to her own logic, relying on it to chart her course as the head of Epic.

“I wonder sometimes why more people don't do that,” she said. “I always think of it as the yellow brick road. I can see the yellow brick road. I know how to step down it and I don’t want to go off of it. I can see it. And I think for the others maybe they can see it, but they question it. They say, ‘Is it really the yellow brick road?’ But they probably know it is.”

Faulkner asks questions, too, but they are vehicles for solutions rather than doubts. They aid in her single-minded goal to create the best medical software of its kind and to effectively push her employees to help her do so.

Epic’s suite of software has influenced how health care is administered by refining how medical information is collected, analyzed and relayed. The company’s growth has reshaped Dane County — bolstering the economy, spurring housing development and igniting Madison’s restaurant scene.

At its founding in 1979, Epic had three employees: Faulkner and two assistants. Today, it has more than 9,000.

Faulkner has become one of the world’s richest women; Forbes estimates she is worth $2.4 billion. But despite her wealth and the massive influence her company has on Dane County, Faulkner keeps a low profile, avoiding the media and rarely trumpeting Epic’s success beyond the confines of its sprawling, verdant campus.

Faulkner sees health care through the frames of math, which she calls truth, and computer science, its functional better half.

“Math is truth and computer science is what works. It’s great to put them together because you need both,” she said.

From those foundations, she tackles what she sees as an ever-evolving, critical problem: the malfunction of the human body. The intersection of health care and information technology is where Epic has worked over the last 38 years, carving out a greater role for computers in medicine. The well-known MyChart application, used by patients to look up their medical information, is an Epic product.

“I think a lot of it (is) the enormity of the problems people face and the things, the details you have to know to keep them healthier. So that was fascinating to do,” Faulkner said.

“There is the deep passion the clinicians have for caring for their patients and that is infectious,” she said. “You want nothing more than to make sure that you meet the needs of each of those clinicians so they can care best for their patients because they’re depending on us to make sure that they do that well.”

GROWING UP ‘NERDY’

Growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, Faulkner was a nerd before Microsoft founder Bill Gates made them cool.

“I was really glad Bill Gates came on the scene because he made being in our type of environment, he made being nerdy a good thing, not a bad thing,” said Faulkner.

“It was painful to be nerdy when I was growing up and I clearly was nerdy. But I think it became a perfectly fine thing to be nerdy after Bill Gates,” she said. “So that, it isn’t as much defying anything, it’s who are you, really, and can you be who you are?”

Faulkner’s life is informed by the parents who raised her. They were hard workers, longtime peace activists and community volunteers, according to their obituaries in The Oregonian newspaper in Portland. Both died in 2007.

Faulkner’s father, Louis Greenfield, was a pharmacist and helped spark her interest in health care, she said.

Her mother, Del, “never went to college. She graduated high school (with) straight A’s at age 15,” Faulkner said. “Only later did she realize she could have gotten in for free because she was such a good student and I think that really made her sad. It was a huge regret in life she didn’t do that.”

Just outside the Epic conference room window hangs a framed certificate, a reprint of a Nobel Peace Prize given to Del Greenfield. Greenfield was the director of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, which, through its affiliation with International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985.

“That was pretty neat,” said Faulkner.

Faulkner has a sister who is a physician and a brother who is an attorney. Her husband, Gordon, is a pediatrician. The Faulkners have three adult children, two daughters and a son.

ENTERING A NEW FIELD

Faulkner came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1965 to pursue a master’s degree in computer sciences after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

UW-Madison’s computer sciences program was only the second in the country at the time. Its curriculum wasn’t finalized, professors weren’t sure in which school it fit and women researchers were few.

An early class Faulkner took at UW-Madison introduced her to the potential in pairing computer science and medicine.

“Sometimes I think it’s a river you’re floating down. Life just takes you different places,” Faulkner said. “When I was in graduate school, I took maybe what was the first-ever computers in medicine course offered in the world.”

The coupling of computers and medicine was unconventional at the time, said UW-Madison computer sciences professor emeritus Larry Travis, Faulkner’s academic adviser.

“It wasn’t clear that computer applications belonged in the field,” he said.

Early medical computing devices had to be manually fed with information, stored on spinning reels of magnetic tapes.

Travis said he got to know Faulkner “reasonably well” as a student. They met for an hour each week and she distinguished herself quickly, he said.

“She took a lot of initiative. She did have a lot to say and a lot to discuss, a lot of questions to ask,” he said. “I can remember hoping that she would stay on as my advisee. If I had the opportunity I would have liked to work with her doing Ph.D. research.”

Faulkner didn’t pursue a Ph.D. but UW-Madison awarded her with an honorary doctorate from the Computer Sciences Department in 2010. Epic has endowed three faculty positions within the department.

PATIENT POWER

Two of Faulkner’s early mentors were Dr. Warner Slack and Dr. John Greist, both advocates for applying computing devices to logistical health care problems. Faulkner did research with both men that ultimately led her to create Epic’s initial software.

“In 1965 I had the idea (called ‘patient power’) that we could program a computer to interact directly with patients to engage in a meaningful dialogue to explore medical problems in detail and do so in a personalized and considerate manner,” said Slack, a neurology resident then and now a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Physicians balked at the idea that they could be replaced, in part, by a computer to interact with patients, collect the information they reported and organize it, Slack said.

“It was quite controversial at its time,” he said. “Any doctor that can be replaced by a computer deserves to be replaced by a computer. We’re primarily interested in helping patients, not preserving the traditions of our profession.”

Slack said Faulkner was an “outstanding student and had wonderful ideas.”

“I found her to be very thoughtful,” he said. “She was far-sighted in her thinking.”

Greist met Faulkner in 1969 when he was the chief resident in internal medicine at UW. Together, they would become the primary co-founders of Human Services Computing, later to be renamed Epic.

Greist needed a graduate student to make a call schedule for the hospital using a computer, and called on Faulkner. She stayed up all night several nights in a week to finish it, Greist said.

“This tells you a lot about Judy. When she said she was going to do it, she meant she was going to do it,” he said. “She had kids, and I had kids. She would come and stay at our house over here by West High School. And she would work all night sometimes getting this program done.”

Faulkner later developed a computer program called Patient Information, Storage and Retrieval, or PISAR. She, along with Greist, decided to form a company around it, aiming to use it as a tool to organize and gather patient information.

“The goal of all of this was to bend this computing tool to things that would help people who happen to be patients,” Greist said.

COURTESY OF EPIC SYSTEMS

HUMBLE ORIGINS

Epic Systems had scrappy beginnings. Faulkner, Greist and the other co-founders started Human Services Computing in a basement on Madison's near west side in 1979.

The office space at 2020 University Avenue — a building that would later become home to Pleasant Rowland's famous American Girl doll franchise — was sparse. The business had some furniture, Steelcase desks that an interior designer had picked up for them on the cheap, and not much else.

The team did what they could to add some pop to the office, Faulkner said.

“We just got a lot of paint, and painted it different shades of purple,” said Faulkner.

The hardware that hosted the code was a top of the line Data General Eclipse “minicomputer.” The machine, small compared to warehouse-sized mainframes of the era, was housed in a metal chassis the height of a refrigerator.

“The machine was brand new. Every bit of equipment was great. We didn't have much money for anything else,” said Greist.

Jane Jiumaleh, who trained clients to use Epic’s software in the early 1980s, remembers the office as “a little slapdash.“ If she needed to find the tickets for her next flight to meet with a client, she had to rifle through piles of papers strewn across desktops.

“It wasn't messy in a slovenly way, it was messy in a busy personal way,” she said.

Even during the hardscrabble early years, Greist said Faulkner valued fun. Back then, that meant themed picnics. Today, it’s the Epic campus’ Harry Potter-themed castle, Indiana Jones-styled hallway and a treehouse.

Faulkner’s whimsy is also on display each year at the company’s Users Group Meeting — an annual gathering of thousands of Epic clients at the Verona campus — when she dresses up in costume to deliver her keynote address. One year, she was Supergirl; another, she was a Harley-Davidson biker. Most recently, she was the Mad Hatter from “Alice in Wonderland.”

John Volker, the former mayor of Verona, remembers when Faulkner personally delivered a new customized fire truck to Verona's station — a gift that would help the department respond to emergencies in Epic's underground parking structures. She showed up with her white Samoyed dog covered in black cut-out spots to make it look like a dalmatian.

“Her sense of humor, I’d say it rivals ‘Monty Python,’” Volker said.

Faulkner’s love and patronage of art is well known. Sculptures, paintings and imaginative furniture fill Epic’s company’s buildings and campus, many of which are bought at Art Fair on the Square, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art's annual summer art fair. Faulkner frequently buys big-ticket pieces that can make an artist’s year.

The art and whimsy both contribute to an atmosphere of comfort that hopefully makes work more fun, Faulkner said.

“It is not fun in that it's a party. It is that you have to like the work you're doing. Because if you don't...it's a big part of your life. It's important to enjoy it,” she said.

Enjoying the work can enable you to ultimately do it better, Faulkner said. When she meets with potential clients, Faulkner doesn't stress out about it — she just tries to get to know them and understand, she said.

“I often don't think of this as, ‘Oh, this is stressful.’ I think of it as, ‘Whether they choose us or whether they don't choose us, I want to have fun meeting them. I want to learn who they are. I want to learn what they do,’” she said.

HARD WORK, HIGH EXPECTATIONS

The Epic culture Faulkner has cultivated reflects her emphasis on fun. But she also works hard — really hard — and the rest of Epic does too.

Faulkner “was the kind of person who would stay up all night and get it done. And then she'd be looking at you like, ‘you're going to stay up all night too,’” said Jiumaleh, the early employee.

“There may be some people who work as hard as Judy,” said Greist. “But I'm pretty sure there's nobody who's worked harder.”

The impetus for the grind comes in part from the gravity of Epic’s work, recording and holding the sensitive medical information of hundreds of thousands of people and powering software in real time that enables doctors to save patients.

An Epic application misfire during an operation, or while a prescription is being filled, can have direct, intimate consequences. Those real-time ramifications translate to high expectations for employees.

“She cares very deeply. She has very high, high standards and really no tolerance for ‘We’re not going to do it because it’s hard,’” said a manager at Epic who has been with the company for more than 10 years and requested anonymity to talk openly about his employer.

“She is perfectly comfortable saying, ‘This is the right thing to do. Figure out how you’re going to do it,’ which pushes the company to do things it wouldn’t otherwise,” he said. “If you say you can do something, you better do it. And if you say something is hard and it’s going to take you longer, she is going to press you to do it a lot faster.”

Working directly with Faulkner is known to be intense. A common phrase among managers: “Working with Judy is like walking on the sun,” he said.

Jeff Wu, a former manager at Epic who worked as a software implementer there from 2006 to 2012, said Epic’s style mirrors Faulkner’s.

“She’s looking for people who have the right cultural fit,” he said. “It comes down to the mission, right? I think that’s what keeps and sustains Epic. People buy into the mission, that they’re really making a difference by making the software that’s produced there. Judy paints a really strong picture of it … then you’re more likely to make some sacrifices.”

Critics say the company exploits the sacrifices employees make. Epic has been subject to a string of class-action lawsuits for its overtime pay policies, which some critics say leave workers uncompensated for hundreds of hours of work. One such case is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wu, who now works in health care analytics in Madison, said his Epic experience was a good one that prepared him well for later career opportunities. But as the company became the leader in the electronic health record industry and grew quickly he started to see a change in the culture.

“The culture was starting to get diluted,” he said. “It’s becoming more like they’re arrogant and they assume they’re the best at it, as opposed to working hard to be the best. One of the things that Judy has said is to fight against a sense of entitlement and I think that’s been lost over the last couple of years.”

 

Judy Faulkner poses next to a Data General minicomputer in 1982 at the company’s headquarters in the basement of 2020 University Avenue. The computer, about the height of a refrigerator, used magnetic tape as storage.

AN EPIC JOURNEY

Epic became Epic in 1983, a decade before today’s youngest hires were born.

The Epic name was an idea from Marjorie Klein, a longtime former board member at Epic, early investor and a retired psychiatry professor at UW-Madison. Klein and Faulkner looked up “epic” in the dictionary and saw it was a “glorious recounting of a nation’s events.” They substituted “patient” for “nation” to reflect the longevity of a medical record and the continuity of care, Faulkner said.

“They were very interested in using the computers to encourage people to answer questions that would further their progress — so that’s the journey aspect of it,” said Klein.

Faulkner was a proponent of changing the company’s name to Epic from Human Services Computing. She was committed to the change, although at the time it caused friction with Greist.

In hindsight, Greist said he’s happy she fought for the Epic name.

“She was absolutely right to switch it to something simpler,” he said. “Who would remember a name like Human Services Computing? Everyone can remember Epic.”

The conflicting visions for the company led to Greist divesting and stepping back from Epic. But today, Greist said there's no bad blood between him and Faulkner. She is tough, strong-headed, and tells it like it is, he said. He likes that about her.

“There are no alternate facts with Judy Faulkner,” he said. “The facts are the facts.”

And with those facts, honesty is paramount.

“Everybody knows that you shouldn't lie,” said Faulkner. “But I think that to not omit something (is) important. To never mislead. To not allow someone to make a conclusion that is false without correcting it. Those are the things that we teach our people to do. And I think that really also frees them.”

SHE DID IT HER WAY

At the crux of Epic’s reputation in the electronic health record industry is control — a control over how it interfaces with customers, but also over the way the company itself has developed. In a market rife with billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions, Epic has never once acquired another company or piece of software. Every facet of the company’s software is made by Epic — a point that Faulkner bragged about during the most recent Users Group Meeting last fall.