VERONA — Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner kicked off her company’s state and county fair-themed Users Group Meeting Tuesday by providing a glimpse of what’s on the horizon in the electronic medical records space: Virtually all of it is driven by AI tools woven throughout Epic’s software, she said.
Bedecked in Western garb, Faulkner addressed the company’s 12,000 seat Deep Space Auditorium on its sprawling campus and explained how Epic’s relentless innovation, including the incorporation of artificial intelligence in its software, continues to help clinicians reduce costs and improve the patient experience with new products and the refining of existing products.
UGM 2026 is a four-day event that has attracted thousands of clinicians and healthcare leaders that use Epic’s electronic medical records software.
The meeting provides Epic customers opportunities to network, share ideas and explore what’s coming next — including what the company calls “cool stuff” – in health information technology.
Since last year, when Epic told its users it would launch 167 projects in the coming year, Faulkner said 84 are completed, 76 are in progress and seven will be completed soon.
“What you hear here is very likely to happen,” Faulkner said, “so take notes.”
Epic’s EHR software is deployed across the world in hospitals, health systems and homes. The records are used to store, share and analyze health data, and they cover everything from inpatient and ambulatory (outpatient) care, to image archiving, to laboratory information systems.
Each year, new features reach deeper into business and clinical systems in an effort to improve financial and clinical performance.
Faulkner said the ever-expanding amount of healthcare intelligence is made possible by electronic health records, including Epic’s patient portal MyChart used by roughly 190 million patients, and the company’s Cosmos, a massive though HIPAA-limited healthcare database that aggregates de-identified EHR data from participating healthcare organizations.
Faulkner said the data generated by 320 million patients in 23 billion encounters support both clinical decision-making at the point of care and medical research and “creates health care intelligence.”
In one case, Faulkner said the availability of this data helped a physician successfully treat a patient with uncontrolled hypertension and a strong distrust of common medications which had not proven effective. She said the physician was able to use data gleaned from available intelligence to find an effective treatment and build trust with the patient who could visually read the evidence at the point of care.
Faulkner said the availability of data has reached the point where subscribers to EpicResearch.org are using the company’s tools to generate more research than Epic itself.
Among its newest efficiency offerings is Agent Factory, an agentic AI tool embedding within the Epic electronic health record that enables health systems to build and monitor AI agents that can make decisions and automate clinical and administrative workflows.
New tools include Orchard, which is being used to extend Epic’s capabilities to small hospitals and understaffed critical access hospitals in rural areas; and Garden Plot, a cloud-based EHR for small and independent medical groups.
After years of resisting customer requests to develop a Clinical Trial Management System, Faulkner said Epic has developed a system for “end-to-end” study management.
Dominant player
This constant innovation is aided by the company’s financial performance. Epic reports over $4.9 billion in annual revenue and has more than 14,000 global employees. It remains debt-free, and at Faulkner’s insistence, it has never pursued venture capital or an initial public offering for listing on the stock market.
The company, which continues to expand its whimsical 1,670-acre Verona campus, is not without an occasional challenge.
Its noncompete employee contracts still are being challenged in the courts, and it faces an anti-trust lawsuit filed in Texas and a related investigation into alleged anti-competitive practices by the Federal Trade Commission.
In August, its president, Sumit Rana, left the company to attend to family matters, raising some questions about its post-Faulkner leadership team.
Little of that was evident at the annual User’s Group Meeting, which attracts enough visitors to Madison to fill virtually every hotel room in the city, not to mention every seat in the Deep Space Auditorium.
The focus is, as always, on what Epic customers can expect in the way of innovation.
On its website, the company frequently cites examples of how its customers are deploying its medical records software to bring ambient AI to nurses, share medical images with other health systems, or help understaffed rural hospitals improve their recruiting.
At UGM, Faulkner issued a plea for Epic users to turn on more of these tools after their installation and use them to a greater extent. Those who have were honored following her annual executive address, but those who haven’t were reminded of both the financial and clinical benefits.
The most dramatic example of how the company’s software is making a difference is in organ donation. After partnering with Donate Life America and connecting MyChart to the National Donate Life Registry, Faulkner said MyChart now is “the No. 1 source for organ donations in the U.S.”
