Epic Systems' Tough Billionaire

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | April 18, 2012

Judith Faulkner...has made a fistful. From her remote midwestern outpost, Faulkner, 68, has quietly built Epic, which sells electronic health records into a $1.2 billion (2011 revenues) business—double four years ago...Helping enrich Faulkner is also a piece of government legislation that subsidizes the adoption of electronic medical records, by paying millions to qualifying hospitals. Forbes estimates her net worth at $1.7 billion. 

But in an era pushing for openness, Epic has accomplished this in a decidedly old-fashioned way...It is essentially a closed platform, which makes it challenging and costly for hospitals to interface Epic with clinical or billing software from other companies for the purpose of merging patient information. In addition to the software, customers pay dearly for hardware, and for the army of Epic-certified technicians that needs to be deployed to get the system up and running...

The company turns down customers, and it doesn’t negotiate on price—or price snafus. When it made a $200,000 pricing error in its contract with Edward Hospital in Naperville, Ill., it asked the hospital to fork over the amount in full. “They told us ‘you don’t have to buy our software,’” says Bobbie Byrne, the hospital’s vice president of health information technology...