Bob Wachter

They know how big an industry it is.

They all seem to screw it up time after time.

It's not that they don't have enough smart people or enough resources.

It is that so much of healthcare is local baseball.

How payment works, how doctors think, how things are organized, they're just so far away from the day-to-day workflow.

The real winner here probably is Epic, meaning that this advantage of incumbency, of having all the data in it already, and so far they are building AI tools for basically everything.

They're probably not as good as a tool built by a third-party company that's focusing on this one use case, but the advantage of having an integrated tool and building tools that are good enough, and if I'm a hospital, I'm trying to decide, do I wait for Epic's tool

All I have to do is turn a switch and it's on, and I'm sure Epic's going to be in business in five years, or do I buy a tool from this really cool new startup down south of Market in San Francisco, but I'm not sure they're going to be in business.

A healthcare organization like mine, their default setting is to buy it from Epic rather than to buy it from the third party.

I assume that everyone in the world has tried or is trying to buy Epic?

Everyone in the world has tried to buy Epic.

And the answer from Judy Faulkner, who is now 82, is that it is not for sale.

She does not accept any investment.

Is there a next generation of Faulkner leadership?

It's probably an internal person because the culture of the company is pretty insular.

But they seem like they want to remain private for the foreseeable future.

not just seem in her will, it says that it must remain private.

It goes to a consortium of current employees and her family and cannot be sold.

And how do you feel about that?

Judy had a partner in the early days, and the argument they had was over this.