Epic founder Judy Faulkner says clinicians and AI are ‘better than either one alone’

"AI can catch things a clinician might miss, and a clinician can catch things AI might miss,” Judy Faulkner, founder and CEO of Epic, said in a written response sent through the company’s media relations team.

I asked Faulkner what advice she would give community college students preparing for nursing careers as artificial intelligence becomes part of clinical care.

Faulkner described a patient in a hospital bed surrounded by monitors, each displaying important numbers. The volume of information can overwhelm one person, she said.

AI can read those measurements together and predict a condition such as sepsis earlier than a clinician working through several streams of information at once, Faulkner said.

“What AI doesn’t catch is body language,” Faulkner said. “For example, the worry on a patient or loved one’s face. The clinician catches that.”

The question reaches students in the Community College of Aurora’s Nursing Education Program, which welcomed its first associate degree cohort in fall 2025. CCA says the 73.5-credit program runs full time for five to six semesters and prepares graduates to take the NCLEX-RN licensing examination and work as registered nurses.

The curriculum includes nursing fundamentals, pharmacology, maternal and child nursing, lab work, clinical practice and simulations. The program’s published learning outcomes call for students to use critical thinking and clinical reasoning to make patient-centered care decisions.

Faulkner’s response followed her appearance at Aspen Ideas: Health in a session titled “The Epic Story of Data Pioneer Judy Faulkner.” The session focused on the company’s history and its expansion of AI tools that can synthesize medical histories, reduce documentation work and streamline coding and billing.

Faulkner founded Epic in a basement in 1979 with three half-time employees. The company now says more than 325 million patients have current electronic records in its system. Epic also says its software is used in more than 3,600 hospitals.

Epic reported in March that more than 85% of its customers use at least one of its AI capabilities. In February, the company released AI Charting, which listens during patient visits, drafts clinical notes and queues possible orders based on the conversation.

Faulkner compared the relationship between a clinician and AI to a driver using an automated vehicle.

“The car has multiple cameras on the road, but the driver understands road signs and other things the cameras don’t,” Faulkner said. “Together they’re better than either one alone.”