One of the 20 newcomers on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans is from the Madison area. Judy Faulkner, 68, who founded medical software company Epic Systems Corp. in 1979, has a net worth of $1.7 billion and comes in at No. 285 on the annual list, which was released Wednesday. Forbes notes that 40 percent of the U.S. population will have its medical information stored with Epic software by next year. Faulkner is ranked No. 764 on the Forbes list of billionaires worldwide.
“It may seem like it’s, in some ways, an overnight success but they built it over the years,” said Dan Olszewski, director of the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship at the UW-Madison School of Business. “They’ve had a great strategy of being very focused on customers that it targets and solving their customers’ problems.”