Stories by Marc Eisen

Epic Systems, the electronic medical records pioneer, has put Dane County on the map. I sketch out four strategic moves by the reclusive giant in this Isthmus story.

Epic is the big winner in the federally subsidized effort to shift American medical care from paper to electronic records. As part of President Obama’s economic stimulus plan, Congress approved a $27 billion incentive program in 2009 that touched off a mad scramble to modernize health systems in the name of improved efficiency and better care.

These health systems, which involve hospital and physician networks, can be complicated contraptions, and no company was better situated to harmonize its knotty internal operations than the well-seasoned Epic, which was founded in 1979 in the shadow of UW-Madison by the charismatic computer wizard Judith Faulkner.

Epic cleaned up in that gold rush. Today, one out of two Americans have their medical records on Epic software, and revenues at the fast-growing privately held company hit $1.7 billion in 2013.

Famously insular and only occasionally open to nosey reporters, Epic declined to provide an executive to be interviewed about its recent strategic moves. But local Epic watchers, a few on the record and more speaking not for attribution (they’re reticent because Epic is feared as well as respected), see a new strategy taking hold.

To read about those moves, please go here.

Lots of other Epic stories can be found by using the search engine at the right

This entry was posted on November 5, 2014 at 5:12 am and is filed under Development, Tech, TheDailyPage.com/Isthmus. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Economic development, Epic Systems, Judith Faulkner, Kay Plantes, Mark Bakken