Every August, Epic Systems founder Judy Faulkner holds court with over 20,000 people, including staff and executives from her most devoted customers, in an auditorium buried five stories into the Wisconsin earth. At the company’s annual meeting, she takes the stage to unveil her company’s latest innovations — products that inevitably form a technological road map for America’s hospitals.
This year, the crowd will also be watching Faulkner’s speech for another reason.
The company she founded nearly half a century ago, now the nation’s dominant seller of electronic health records software, is facing an unprecedented series of challenges driven by antitrust lawsuits, questions about its artificial intelligence strategy, an exodus of key technology leaders, and, most recently, the disclosure that state and federal investigators are looking into the company’s business practices.
