Epic Systems Brand Guidelines: The Verona Health-Record Maker Behind MyChart

Three half-time employees and a name taken from poetry.

Epic Systems began in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1979. The company’s own “Our Story” page says it was founded in a basement with three half-time employees. English Wikipedia names the founder as Judith Faulkner, who had taken a course on computing in medicine while studying for her master’s degree and was asked to build a system to keep track of patient information. Shortly after graduating, Wikipedia says, she co-founded a firm called Human Services Computing with John Greist, the start of the business now called Epic.

The company explains its name on the same page. An epic, it says, is a long telling of a nation’s events, like the Iliad or the Odyssey, and its health records tell the story of a patient’s care over time. That idea of a record as a long story runs through the names of its software: the central database is called Chronicles.

Epic stayed in Madison for its first quarter-century. English Wikipedia says it moved its headquarters to a large campus in the suburb of Verona in 2005. Documents filed with the city, Wisconsin Public Radio reported in July 2023, show that Verona first approved an Epic campus and headquarters in 2003; by 2023 the company had five campuses there, was designing a sixth and employed around 13,000 people. The city had just approved a four-storey underground car park for 2,050 vehicles to serve the new campus, the station reported, alongside plans to add two buildings and hire 1,700 more staff that year.

The campus itself has become part of the company’s image. Wikipedia describes signage calling it “Epic Intergalactic Headquarters” and themed buildings including a castle-like structure, a shipwreck-themed building, a “Wizard Campus” and a dining hall modelled on London’s King’s Cross station.

Chronicles, Hyperspace and MyChart.

Epic makes one large family of software rather than many separate products. English Wikipedia describes its electronic health record as built on the Chronicles real-time database, with clinicians working in a client application called Hyperspace. Around it sit analytics tools grouped as Cogito, with the Clarity and Caboodle databases, and Cosmos, a data set that Wikipedia says draws de-identified records from many organisations.

For patients, the visible part of Epic is MyChart, the patient portal. Wikipedia describes it as the place where patients see their records, book appointments, request medicine refills, message their care team and pay bills. Epic’s own website runs a separate MyChart site, and in October 2026 its home page featured a parenting programme from the Mount Sinai Parenting Center delivered to parents’ phones through MyChart.

The company describes its users broadly. Its “Our Story” page lists academic medical centres, children’s hospitals, community hospitals, dental clinics, hospices, rehab centres and urgent-care clinics among them, and says more than 325 million patients have a current record in Epic. Wikipedia names customers including the Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Kaiser Permanente and all Mayo Clinic campuses, and says Epic also offers cloud hosting and consultants through a subsidiary, Boost.

Epic presents itself in plain, slightly playful terms. Its website calls the company “a software factory” that makes no acquisitions, and says it is employee-owned and developer-led and puts 35 percent of operating expenses into research and development. It also says it has been ranked first overall for its software suite by the research firm KLAS for 16 years running. Its customers meet at user-group events the website lists as UGM and XGM, and in late 2026 its home page promoted Art, which it calls Epic’s AI for clinicians, drafting replies to patient messages for nurses to review.

How health software presents itself.

Health-record software is hard to photograph. The product is a database and a set of screens used by clinicians, so the companies that make it tend to show the people around the software instead: a nurse or doctor with a tablet at a bedside, a patient checking a phone, a team gathered around a monitor. Where the software itself appears, it is usually as a clean chart, schedule or dashboard screenshot with invented patient details.

The patient portal has become one of the most visible parts of these brands. Phone screens showing test results, appointment bookings and messages to a care team are now a standard image in the category, because the portal is often the only part of a hospital’s system that patients ever see under the software maker’s own name.

Headquarters matter too. Several of the larger companies built campuses in their home towns and use them in their storytelling, from themed office buildings in Wisconsin to office parks in Kansas City. Those campuses host training, customer visits and, in some cases, the companies’ own user-group meetings, such as Epic’s UGM, which its website lists among its events.

The rest of the category’s public face is shaped by conferences. Trade gatherings such as HIMSS and HLTH bring vendors, hospitals and investors together each year, and companies stage their own events alongside them, like the Oracle Health and Life Sciences Summit. Booths, keynote stages and product demonstrations at these events supply much of the imagery the industry uses to present itself. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it today and what it says about its own software.

From Wisconsin to national health systems.

From the late 2010s Epic sold its systems to countries with public health services, English Wikipedia says, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Finland and Norway. It lists offices in Bristol, ’s-Hertogenbosch, Dubai, Helsinki, Melbourne, Singapore, Trondheim and Søborg, and says North Somerset Council approved plans in January 2025 for a European headquarters campus near Long Ashton, west of Bristol.

Several of those projects drew public criticism. Wikipedia records complaints from staff after a Danish region went live in 2016; a complaint signed by 619 doctors in 2022 about the Apotti system in the Helsinki region; and protests in central Norway after the system, branded Helseplattformen there, went live in November 2022. Its first UK installation, at Cambridge University Hospitals in October 2014, also ran into serious early problems, according to the same article.

Epic has also been a party to notable court cases. In May 2018 the US Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, a case about employment contracts, that arbitration agreements requiring individual arbitration are enforceable under the Federal Arbitration Act. In September 2024 the health-data start-up Particle Health sued Epic, alleging anti-competitive conduct; Epic asked for the case to be dismissed, and in September 2025 a federal judge allowed it to proceed, Wikipedia says. A second software company, CureIS Healthcare, filed a similar suit in May 2025, and in December 2025 the Texas attorney general sued Epic over competition.

For a design guide, Epic Systems shows how a software company can build a brand from a story about records and a campus people talk about. Compare Cerner, the Kansas City rival founded the same year, and MEDITECH. For this guide we use a deep red, cream and slate blue with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Epic Systems’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.