While Epic continued to get larger in 2025, the company had its slowest year of EHR market share growth over the past half-decade.
But health system CIOs told Becker’s they predict the healthcare IT giant can keep expanding its reach, as the company increasingly designs software products outside the traditional EHR.
“While Epic may be nearing saturation in the EHR market, it still has significant room to grow by expanding both the depth and breadth of its offerings,” said Joy Oh, chief information and digital transformation officer at Cincinnati-based Christ Hospital Health Network. “We are already seeing this shift, as Epic brings capabilities previously provided by third parties — such as clinical communications and digital scribe — into its core platform.”
Ms. Oh and other health IT leaders also point to Epic’s development of an enterprise resource planning platform that could help health systems further reduce their application footprint and compete with the likes of Oracle and Workday. Epic typically unveils its plans for growth and new products around the time of its annual Users Group Meeting, held in August.
Epic controlled 43.7% of the acute care EHR hospital market share in 2025, up from 31% in 2021, but it was the company’s slowest year of growth by percentage points in that time span, KLAS Research reported May 14.
Overall, acute care hospital EHR purchases are on the decline, with only two large health systems making enterprisewide moves in 2025 (both chose Epic), according to the report. Epic’s gains last year mostly came from small health systems and midsize standalone hospitals, adding 49 hospitals (out of 77 total) from those types of organizations.
“Most of the larger systems are already on Epic (with the exception of HCA), and Northwell is converting this year,” said Lisa Nelson, PharmD, associate vice president of IT applications and chief applications officer of University of Rochester (N.Y.) Medicine. “There are only so many large systems left to convert.”
Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare is a longtime client of EHR vendor Meditech, while of the top 10 U.S. health systems by revenue, only Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare (an Oracle Health customer) isn’t at least partially on Epic. Epic also leads among small health systems (two to 10 hospitals), standalone hospitals with over 200 beds, academic medical centers, and children’s hospitals, per KLAS.
This market dominance has led to legal trouble. Epic is facing antitrust claims from data startup Particle Health and a lawsuit from Texas’ attorney general alleging the company is monopolizing the EHR industry.
“We try to do things that are right, that are good for the public, good for the customers. And it’s too bad if we have a better product than somebody else,” Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner told Katie Couric during a recent interview. “I think our customers should have the right to choose that product, not that we can’t build it.”
Besides expanding into ERPs, Epic is developing such capabilities as documentation management and staff scheduling to compete with the leaders in those spaces, Dr. Nelson said.
Epic could also broaden its footprint to include more specialties, grow clinical research for academic customers, and tap into other hospital vendor services like dining, hearing aids and genomics, noted Curtis Cole, MD, vice president and chief global information officer of Ithaca, N.Y.-based Cornell University.
“And, of course, they could decide to meaningfully go international,” he said. “Their price point is still high to make it in most countries. And they would need a massive reeducation in cultural sensitivity to meet local needs rather than dictate their vision as they do in the U.S. But they could go there.”
Dr. Cole said he “would actually love to see them not worry about growth and profit and instead focus on getting better and staying up to date technically. As a private company, they don’t have to chase quarters and could choose instead to chase quality. That would certainly be better for doctors and patients.”
Ms. Faulkner argued in a recent “Freakonomics Radio” interview that profitability “isn’t a goal” at Epic — “it’s a side effect.”
“We have enough money as revenue to run our company and be successful,” she said in the podcast. “Our customers need it more than we do, and so we don’t want to misuse them. … I say you shouldn’t concentrate or focus on the revenue side, but you can’t be stupid about it.”
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