Yes, Epic is a software company. Specifically, it is the largest electronic health records (EHR) software provider in the United States, holding about 42% of the hospital market as of 2024. If you’ve visited a hospital or large medical practice in recent years, there’s a good chance your doctor used Epic to pull up your chart, write prescriptions, and review test results.
Epic Systems Corporation is a privately held company based in Verona, Wisconsin. It builds large-scale software that hospitals and health systems use to manage nearly every aspect of patient care, from scheduling appointments to billing insurance. The software is not sold directly to consumers. Patients interact with it indirectly through their doctors’ offices and through a patient-facing app called MyChart.
What Epic Software Actually Does
At its core, Epic replaces paper medical records with a digital system. When a nurse checks you in, records your vitals, and hands you off to a physician who then orders bloodwork and writes a prescription, each of those steps can happen inside Epic. The software ties together clinical notes, lab results, imaging, medications, and billing into a single patient record that follows you across departments and visits.
Beyond general record-keeping, Epic includes specialized modules for different areas of medicine. Its cardiology module supports heart-related procedures and integrates imaging data like echocardiograms into the patient record. Its oncology module helps clinicians manage chemotherapy protocols, track radiation therapy, and submit cancer staging data to national registries. Similar tools exist for dozens of other specialties, which is one reason large academic medical centers gravitate toward Epic: one system can serve an entire hospital network.
MyChart: The Part Patients See
If you’ve ever logged into a portal called MyChart to check lab results or message your doctor, you were using Epic’s patient-facing software. MyChart lets you schedule appointments, attend video visits, request prescription refills, and view after-visit summaries that include vitals, medication lists, and your physician’s notes. You can also pay bills, set up payment plans, and get cost estimates for upcoming procedures.
MyChart is free for patients. The hospital or health system pays for the Epic license, and MyChart comes as part of that package.
How Big Epic’s Reach Is
Epic dominates the U.S. hospital software market. Its market share grew from 39.1% to 42.3% in 2024 alone, according to Becker’s Hospital Review. Major institutions like Mayo Clinic, Mass General Brigham, and Duke University Health System all run on Epic.
One of the platform’s selling points is that records can travel between hospitals. Epic’s interoperability feature, called Care Everywhere, has exchanged more than 221 million patient records in a single month. About half of those exchanges happen between Epic hospitals and hospitals running a completely different EHR system. In practical terms, this means if you’re treated at one hospital and then visit an emergency room across the country, your records are more likely to be accessible than they were a decade ago.
Why It Costs So Much
Epic is enterprise software, meaning it’s designed for large organizations with thousands of users. The price tag reflects that. Mayo Clinic’s Epic implementation cost $1.5 billion. Mass General Brigham and Northwell Health each spent $1.2 billion. Even mid-sized health systems routinely invest $200 million to $500 million. These figures cover not just the software license but also hardware, staff training, data migration from older systems, and years of consulting support to get everything running.
Smaller independent practices rarely use Epic because of this cost. They tend to use lighter, less expensive EHR products. Epic’s customer base is concentrated among large hospitals, academic medical centers, and integrated health systems with the budget and IT infrastructure to support it.
Epic vs. Other Software You Might Know
Epic is not consumer software like Microsoft Office or Google Workspace. You cannot buy it, download it, or install it on your personal computer. It runs on servers owned or managed by the health system, and clinicians access it through workstations in the hospital or clinic. The closest comparison in everyday terms would be the internal software a bank uses to manage your accounts: you interact with it through a simplified portal (like MyChart), but the full system lives behind the scenes.
It’s also worth noting that “Epic” sometimes causes confusion because the word is common. Epic Games (maker of Fortnite) and the Epic Games Store are completely unrelated companies. Epic Systems is exclusively a healthcare software company and has been since its founding in 1979.