He watched “hundreds” of surgeries, often with his team in tow, before moving to Seattle, where he now works for a business that matches companies with storage space. “There were people that would pass out in the hallway” of hospitals, said Aaron Webb, who worked at Epic for 10 years as a software developer. Programmers regularly faint at the sight of beating hearts, scalpels and bodily fluids. It’s an experience that young engineers are unlikely to get at, say, Facebook or Snap, working on algorithms that tailor ads to demographic groups or insert rainbow vomit into photographs. If health care programmers make mistakes, he said, “bad things can happen.”Įpic’s coders often leave campus to embed in operating and recovery rooms, where they watch nurses ripping the tops off blood bags and surgeons opening up people’s chest cavities. Dickmann said, was to ensure the safety of patients at facilities that use Epic software. (The company’s dress code is that when visitors are on campus, wear clothes.) All around me, young workers in shorts and band T-shirts hurried past. A conference room named after a Star Wars planet was reached via a rickety swinging bridge. Along the Indiana Jones tunnel, decorated with vines and a golden idol, the sound of dripping water and roaring animals played in a constant loop. At the Black Dragon cafe, which was next to an informal band-practice area, a sandwich board advertised oatmeal for 75 cents and bacon for $1. There was a long series of clay slabs with handprint impressions from longtime employees, and walls and walls of art sourced from Wisconsin-area artists: a dragon perched in an iron bird cage expanses of blue and purple stained glass a clock featuring manicured poodles and Cupid an old-timey circus ad painted on canvas. I paused at the Cavey Den, a hollowed-out treehouse with stumps for seats and children’s books, then rocked on a rocking horse and ate a cookie from a jar, wondering what time was set aside for naps. The design theme was childish even by the standards of technology start-ups, where ball pits and scooters are common. I was asked to sign an old-fashioned guest book, given a “Hello! My name is” sticker and a few pages of directions, and told I could wander the campus’s 25 buildings and numerous footpaths on my own. I walked past a sculpture of Humpty Dumpty, set on a wall and typing away on an Epic laptop, past the warning against carrying concealed weapons (Wisconsin allows them in most public venues), and into reception. I drove past a giant Tin Man, the first indication of the campus’s fairy-tale aesthetic, and into guest parking, in one of the campus’s few aboveground lots. It is by far the dominant player in Verona, where the population of 10,600 is comparable to the company’s head count of 9,800.Įpic’s headquarters were a short drive away, down a meandering road through countryside dotted with Queen Anne’s lace and farm equipment. When I arrived in Epic’s hometown, Verona, two beaming receptionists at the Fairfield Inn tried to offer me something called the “Epic discount.” When I said I couldn’t accept anything of value from the company, they clarified that the special rate was a gesture of gratefulness from the hotel, on account of the huge proportion of guests who come to do business with Epic. Yet most people outside of the Madison environs, I’d be confident to say, have never heard of the company. Workers are discouraged from ordering business materials on Amazon or living more than 45 minutes away from the office, in order to shorten commutes and keep Epic’s wealth in the local economy.Įpic’s software is ubiquitous in doctors’ offices and operating rooms, and companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet regularly hoover up its young engineers. Every month, employees are compelled to gather in a subterranean chamber for two-and-a-half-hour staff meetings that have been likened to a megachurch experience. Those clients - big hospitals and health systems around the United States and more than a dozen overseas markets - are served by customer-service representatives known as BFFs. Its mathematician chief executive, Judy Faulkner, is a billionaire recluse who hosts P.T. The woman who controls it is a septuagenarian coding savant, its campus contains a human-size rabbit hole and an elevator to hell, and in all probability your personal medical records are on servers running its software.Įpic Systems is a health care services provider with $2.7 billion in annual revenue. In the farm country of southern Wisconsin, 12 miles from Madison, is one of the nation’s biggest tech companies - and almost certainly the quirkiest.
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