Judy Faulkner has spent nearly five decades making Epic a fundamental cornerstone of hospital EHR operations. Now, that influence extends well beyond the EHR and delves into some of the biggest questions facing health system leaders: how quickly to deploy AI, how to manage increasingly complex technology, how much to consolidate around a single vendor and how to prepare for a new generation of healthcare infrastructure.
That shift was on display Aug. 18, when the Epic founder and CEO outlined one of the company’s most ambitious product roadmaps yet at its 47th annual Users Group Meeting. Epic is moving ahead with AI-assisted clinical visits, tools that predict patient risks using its Cosmos data platform, an AI agent-building platform, an ERP system and updated versions of its software for smaller and rural organizations.
Then came a reminder of the risks attached to that pace. Ms. Faulkner told attendees at Modern Healthcare’s Leadership Summit that Epic had paused most technology development while hundreds of projects undergo heightened cybersecurity review. Epic said Sept. 23 that its development roadmap remains unchanged.
The announcement’s significance extends far beyond hospital IT departments. Epic controlled 43.7% of the U.S. acute care hospital EHR market and 56.9% of hospital beds in 2025, according to KLAS Research. Its decisions can affect clinical workflows, revenue cycle operations, patient access, technology staffing and capital priorities across hundreds of organizations. Ms. Faulkner is also structuring the company so the philosophy behind those decisions continues beyond her own tenure.
Epic’s 2026 roadmap makes clear that the company no longer sees its role as primarily storing and displaying health records.
Ms. Faulkner recently told customers that “Ergo” — Epic’s healthcare intelligence concept — had moved from vision to product. The model combines information from the EHR, MyChart and Epic’s Cosmos research database with generative AI. Cosmos now contains data from 320 million deduplicated, deidentified patients and 23 billion encounters.
Epic’s Chart with Art documentation tool is already being used by physicians, nurses and other staff, while Art-generated summaries are live at more than 300 healthcare organizations. Curiosity, another product in development, is designed to use Cosmos data to predict outcomes such as length of stay, ED return risk and stroke risk.
The company is also developing Agent Factory, which will allow health systems to use, customize and create AI agents, and EpicOps, its ERP platform. Epic is expanding its offerings for smaller hospitals and physician organizations through products such as Orchard, Garden Plot and Flower Pot.
That shift leaves health systems with a strategic choice: continue adding specialized technology around the EHR or allow more functions to migrate into the Epic ecosystem.
The speed of that product expansion appears to be already changing conversations inside health systems.
Health system CIOs interviewed by Becker’s at Epic’s August UGM described the company’s AI development pace as “blistering” and said the new challenge is deciding how quickly their own organizations can adopt what Epic is releasing.
Ms. Faulkner’s influence also shows up in an Epic characteristic hospital executives repeatedly describe to Becker’s: unusually close vendor relationships.
Cleveland-based MetroHealth, an Epic customer since 1999, meets quarterly with Ms. Faulkner. David Kaelber, MD, PhD, the system’s vice president and chief health informatics officer, previously told Becker’s that one of those conversations ultimately helped produce voice capabilities for Epic’s Hello World communication platform after MetroHealth raised concerns about relying only on text messages for its safety-net population.
“To me, that’s what true partnership looks like — having the right interactions with the company so real changes can happen that benefit both sides,” Dr. Kaelber said.
That experience is not isolated. Leaders at Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Corewell Health, Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Parkview Health, Worcester, Mass.-based UMass Memorial Health and New York City-based Montefiore Einstein told Becker’s in August that their Epic relationships can involve regular executive meetings, direct developer access, early product testing and on-site support.
The relationship model gives customers access to Epic’s development organization, though health system leaders also emphasized that access does not mean control over the vendor’s roadmap.
As Epic’s footprint expands, one key question hospital executives are grappling with is how much of their health system’s future should be built inside a single technology ecosystem.
