Inside Epic Systems' legendary campus, a world away from Wall Street

Dorothy Gale was right—the Land of Oz is not in Kansas. It is located amidst the rolling green fields of Verona, Wisconsin, a town of about 16,400 people about ten miles southwest of the capital, Madison.

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

While the company's workforce is tasked with the massive responsibility of building tools to support doctors and nurses as they care for patients, Epic employees spend their days moving in and out of offices that look like they were ripped straight from the pages of a science fiction novel or children's book.

A yellow brick road inspired by the movie “The Wizard of Oz” winds through the corridors of a bright green building. Giant chocolate bars mark the entrance to the chocolate factory, and a mischievous cat smiles through the window of a building guarded by life-size playing cards.

Last week, thousands of healthcare executives gathered at Epic’s headquarters for its annual user 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 to the stage dressed as a swan, with a thick plumage in her hair.

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

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

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

The company, which has 14,000 employees, has no set budget, has made no acquisitions and has never accepted any investment from venture capitalists. It adheres to a set of 10 commandments, according to its website, the first of which is “not to go public.”

Epic had revenues of $4.9 billion last year. Cerner, Epic's main competitor in the electronic medical records market, went public in 1986 and was acquired by Oracle In 2022, Oracle's revenue was more than $28 billion. According to Oracle's financial statements, Cerner contributed $5.9 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023.

The S&P 500 sub-index of software and services companies trades at 9 times revenue. On average, that would give Epic a valuation of about $45 billion.

Faulkner is not concerned with results like Cerner's. Epic's second commandment is “Don't buy.”

“Why should we be owned by people whose primary interest is the restoration of property rights?” Faulkner said on stage last week.

Walking around Epic's campus, it's clear that the company exists a world away from Wall Street.

Each of Epic’s 28 office buildings has its own theme. They’re divided 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 has required some bargaining with architects, according to Epic’s website.

The conference room chairs fit the intricate themes of the buildings they’re in. And while the dinosaurs, armor, and merry-go-rounds that run through the campus are fun to watch, they also serve a purpose. Faulkner says her plan was to create a friendly environment that could attract and inspire talent and give her employees the quiet space they needed to be productive, according to a series of testimonials on Epic’s website.

“We compete with big tech companies,” Faulkner said in a statement. “And those qualities help us hire the best employees possible. And that helps us be more productive.”

Individual offices should be available to every worker who wants them, Faulkner says. With the vast majority of a company’s workforce coming to headquarters every day, some people have to double up, because hiring often outpaces construction.

For those who want to escape the office entirely, they can ride one of the company's 600 cow-printed bikes to meetings from a treehouse, slide down a rabbit hole, or eat lunch in a train car.

The universe is underground

Epic's title provides the first clue to its underworld existence. The company is set in 1979 in the Milky Way, a nod to its founding date and Faulkner's penchant for celestial subject matter.

Visitors are greeted by a sign reading “Epic Intergalactic Headquarters” as they walk along a winding road between buildings and vast green fields. The roughly 750 acres of Epic’s campus are active farmland, home to 42 sheep, 14 cows and a donkey.

Most of the company's parking structures are located underground, which helps the campus maintain a cool feel from above. It also means employees won't have to worry about scraping snow or ice off their cars during the harsh Midwestern winter.

Even when there's no parking, workers are no strangers to tunnels. The campus buildings are connected by a network of tunnels and closed skywalks, so people don't have to go outside to get between them.

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

“There’s always a grammar lesson in the hall,” Faulkner said at a user group meeting at the hall, which opened in 2013 and can seat about 11,400 people. In fact, the hall is an engineering feat, with no pillars supporting it.

To reach deep space, visitors must descend through the ground levels. The different levels of the building are called Sky, Grass, Dirt, Rock, Magma and Core. The lobby outside the hall is inspired by the Lord of the Rings film series, with the word “Precious” written in bold letters on the wall in giant glowing red letters.

Science fiction references are everywhere. There’s a café called 42, which is the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The Wizarding Academy campus is clearly inspired by Harry Potter, and has its own train station, a giant chess set, and a collection of wild pictures.

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

While each office building is unique, the basic structure of the physical structures is very similar. Long corridors of offices are occasionally interspersed with a conference room, and most buildings are no more than three stories tall, a design choice Faulkner says is intended to promote in-person meetings.

The Prairie Campus houses Epic's oldest offices, and contains buildings named after celestial bodies such as stars, planets, and galaxies.

In the comic book 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 filled with nautical decorations.

The walls of many buildings are decorated from floor to ceiling. Ornaments, ceramics, mosaics and paintings by local artists are displayed everywhere.

As we wandered around the space during the user group meeting, it was easy to forget that Epic is a software company.

But beyond the fictional campus, medical professionals and their patients face very real needs from this tech behemoth. And there are plenty of very real critics.

Epic has been accused for years of being slow to implement interoperability efforts that would help streamline the exchange of patient information between vendors.

Healthcare data in the United States has historically been siloed and difficult to transfer, with clinics, hospitals, and healthcare systems able to 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 (HIPAA).

Oracle, now Epic’s main competitor, says Epic is being too protective. “Everyone in the industry recognizes that Epic CEO Judy Faulkner is the biggest obstacle to EHR interoperability,” Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Gluck wrote in a blog post in May.

Most recently, Epic helped the federal government create a data-sharing network called the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, that aims to settle 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 vast proprietary network. At a user group meeting, Epic announced a number of new generative AI features for its Cosmos platform, an anonymized patient dataset that doctors can use to support treatment and research.

Seth Hein, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, spoke to reporters after the keynote in a conference room decorated like a lodge. Hein had just given a high-profile demo to the audience in which an AI agent assessed his recovery from a purported wrist surgery by referencing data from Cosmos.

He added that these types of tools may be ready within a few years.

“Technology is advancing very quickly,” Hein added.

Watch: Artificial Intelligence Revolutionizes Medical Records