Epic Systems

Epic Systems is the dominant electronic-health-record (EHR) software vendor in the United States for large hospitals and integrated delivery networks, with approximately 40% market share among hospitals with over 500 beds and over 305 million patient records on its platform globally. Founded in 1979 by Judy Faulkner with $70,000 in seed capital, the company has remained privately held throughout its history — Faulkner has publicly committed to keeping it private and not selling. Annual revenue is estimated at $4-5 billion (Epic does not disclose financials).

Epic's product portfolio centers on the EpicCare ambulatory and inpatient EHR, which is implemented at most major US academic medical centers, Veterans Affairs hospitals, and integrated health systems. Companion modules cover scheduling, billing, lab and radiology integration, patient portal (MyChart), and analytics (Cosmos, Caboodle). Epic's tightly-integrated, single-database architecture and famously demanding customer-success approach have driven both its market dominance and its reputation for difficulty of customization.

Epic Cosmos is the company's strategic AI and research initiative — a HIPAA-compliant research database aggregating de-identified patient records from participating Epic-using health systems. Cosmos contains over 250 million patient records and is used by clinicians and researchers for cohort analytics and clinical research. Epic's AI rollout, accelerated through 2023-2024, includes Inbox-message drafting (developed in partnership with Microsoft and Nuance/DAX), patient-summary generation, predictive risk scores embedded directly in clinical workflows, ambient documentation through partnerships with Abridge / Suki / Nuance DAX, and natural-language search across the patient chart. Epic UGM (User Group Meeting) in Verona is one of the largest annual healthcare-IT events in the world, drawing 25,000+ attendees.

Epic environments can now be connected to ChatGPT for Healthcare, an integration OpenAI opened in September 2026 that brings authorized patient context — visit notes, laboratory results, medications and specialist documentation — into ChatGPT so a clinician can ask what has changed since a patient's last visit rather than reading the chart end to end. It supports two shapes: pulling EHR context into ChatGPT, and embedding ChatGPT directly into an EHR layout so the work happens without leaving the patient chart. The University of California, San Francisco health system is a pilot partner. The arrangement is notable less for the capability than for the position it puts Epic in — the system of record now brokers access for a general-purpose frontier model alongside the clinical-documentation partnerships it already runs with Microsoft, Nuance and Abridge.