As Epic has grown, the company has faced intensified legal scrutiny over its size and employment agreements.
According to Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner, noncompetes, for instance, are essential to protect the company’s trade secrets.
“Let’s just look at Coca-Cola, which has its own recipe, which is supposed to be secret,” Ms. Faulkner told Katie Couric during a recent live interview at Epic’s Wisconsin headquarters. “If you’re the person who does the Coca-Cola mix, are you allowed to take a job to go to PepsiCo and teach them the same thing? Probably not.
“And so to some extent, lots of companies would love to know: How do we do what we do? And if someone’s working on something that is confidential here, then I think it’s fair, to protect everybody else, that they can’t go teach somebody who’s going to write a competitive product everything we do.”
Epic recently beat a lawsuit from life sciences tech firm Veeva Systems, which claimed the EHR giant’s noncompetes were hurting its ability to recruit talent to its Madison, Wis., location. Several current and former employees criticized the noncompetes in public comments to the FTC when the agency was considering banning the practice.
But the vendor is still contending with other legal action, including antitrust claims from data startup Particle Health and a lawsuit from Texas’ attorney general for allegedly 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. I think our customers should have the right to choose that product, not that we can’t build it,” Ms. Faulkner said, responding to a question from Ms. Couric on the lawsuits.
“It makes sense to have a system, rather than acquire lots of others, a system uses the same terminology, the same coding schemes, the same colors, the same styles, so that as you travel from one to another, you don’t necessarily even know that you’ve left one program and you’re in another. It all smoothly goes from one to another. And I think that’s important.”
Ms. Couric also asked whether Epic’s practice of regularly announcing products it has not yet developed effectively freezes the market in those product areas.
“I can’t imagine that with the close relationships we have with so many of our customers, if they asked us, what’s coming next, what’s coming up, we would say, ‘I can’t tell you. We’re not going to say a word about it.’ Because they want to know,” Ms. Faulkner said. “And I think it’s a shame that the government or legal groups want to use that as a reason to say that’s anticompetitive.”
Is she stressed about all the lawsuits?
“Hard not to be,” Ms. Faulkner said, responding to Ms. Couric. “But not a whole lot.”
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