In an email sent to Epic staff, Sumit Rana, President of Epic, just shared that he’ll be stepping away from Epic on August 14, 2026. His father recently passed away and he’s decided that he needs to be more present for his mother who lives in India along with devoting more time to his wife and kids. Healthcare IT Today wishes Rana and his family all the best as they navigate this challenging time.
Rana’s departure does leave a hole at Epic that will need to be filled since most in the industry saw Rana as the successor to Judy Faulkner. Plus, Rana had increasingly become the face of Epic at industry events, Epic UGM, and with customers.
We had a chance to ask Rana about the change along with some of his experiences and success at Epic. Plus, we ask him where he sees Epic and the EHR industry in general heading in the future.
Sumit Rana: The overwhelming feeling is gratitude, with some bittersweetness. Our north star has always been that the needs of providers and their patients come first, and I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to make my small contribution to that mission. Leaving people I love working with, colleagues and customers alike, is hard. And I’m at peace with it. This is the right thing for my family right now, and I’m leaving with a full heart.
What are some of your accomplishments at Epic that you’re most proud of?
Sumit Rana: A few things come to mind. I was one of the original developers of MyChart, and it’s humbling to see how it’s grown into something 195 million people use actively around the world to have agency and take part in their own care. As a concrete example of MyChart’s impact, nearly half of all new additions to the National Donate Life Registry in the past year (130,000 new registrations), came through MyChart, because it made it easy for people to record their choice. One donor can save up to eight lives, restore sight to two people, and heal more than 75 people through tissue donation.
I’m proud of Epic’s push into AI, which is giving clinicians precious time back so they can on the person in front of them. It’s saving lives by flagging incidental radiology findings. It is eliminating work that adds no value and automating essential work so there is less administrative burden for both providers and payers.
Most of all, I’m proud of the people I’ve worked with and, in many cases, mentored, and of a culture of ownership that helps them grow and go on to do great things. Our interoperability team is a great example. In April we exchanged a record 845 million records in a single month, more than half of that with other EHRs. We’re leading on TEFCA and partnering with the SSA, VA, and DoD, where organizations using Epic make up over 80% of their data-sharing.
What should Epic customers know about the Epic team without your leadership in place? Who will be filling in your leadership role at Epic in your absence?
Sumit Rana: A small group of strong leaders that others and I have mentored will be stepping up to take on more, and that’s exactly how Epic has always worked. For almost 50 years, this has been a place that grows its own leaders, people ready to make strong contributions to what comes next.
What’s something about Epic that many people from the outside don’t understand?
Sumit Rana: A few things. The biggest is that we take a very long-term view, 20 to 50 years ahead. Being privately held lets us do that. We’re not managing to a quarter or to anyone’s expectations other than our customers’, and that shapes almost everything. A concrete example: we don’t do budgets. Instead, people are expected to know their leading indicators, project where things are heading, and decide their next steps from there. It puts judgment where the work is.
We also hire well. Our process is testing-focused, so we can hire for aptitude, and we have a strong training program to onboard new hires. And there’s an intense focus on accountability and execution. Make clear commitments and honor them; expectations ≡ reality. One small thing that captures the culture: for a job well done, we say “Congratulations” rather than “Thank you.” The work was yours. You earned the outcome. Even our campus is built for it, designed to spark productivity, collaboration, and creativity.
And through all of it, a sense of humor. Serving the mission of healthcare takes hard work, and it’s a lot easier when you’re laughing and having fun.
What role/responsibility do you see Epic playing the broader healthcare industry?
Sumit Rana: One is to build connections. We are building the networks that link the healthcare ecosystem together, connecting providers to their patients, to one another, and to the specialty diagnostics, retail health, post-acute, social safety net, payers, and life sciences organizations, and others that all play a part in someone’s care. When you build those bridges well, you improve patient care, create real efficiencies and take cost out of the system.
A simple example: checking for duplicate imaging orders across sites. Get that right and a patient doesn’t have to drive back to the hospital and lie still in an MRI machine a second time, the doctor can plan the next step of care immediately instead of waiting on a repeat result, and the whole system spends less. One connection, and everyone is better off.
Prior authorization is another. It may be the single most hated process in healthcare today, for patients and providers alike. I’ve read that both providers and payers carry something like 30% administrative overhead around processes like prior authorizations and claims. Connecting those two sides directly can make a real dent in that, and when it works, everyone cheers.
We are also doing our part to create and promote open standards. That means participating in the industry’s work on things like FHIR and USCDI, and being timely about shipping support for them rather than treating standards as someone else’s job. A network is only as good as its ability to connect to everyone else’s, and things only work when everyone does their part.
How do EHRs need to evolve over the next 2 years to avoid being seen as just a legacy system?
Sumit Rana: In my nearly 30 years in this industry, this is not the first time someone has declared the EHR dead or written it off as legacy. And here we are. The EHR is the engine that drives healthcare, and EHRs like ours have never stopped evolving.
There was a time the EHR was defined as just the provider’s system. So we built MyChart, and it became a shared record between patient and provider. There was a time people said someone other than EHRs would build the connections and networks for sharing data. So we built Care Everywhere. And now some say EHRs can’t be AI-native. That’s baloney. We quickly built AI natively into our EHR. Our first use case, helping providers draft responses to patient messages, was up and running within a few months of large language models bursting onto the scene.
And we haven’t stopped. We’re shipping 110 AI capabilities already, with another 90 on the way. Among them, Agent Factory, which brings a digital workforce alongside our customers’ staff, stepping in during peak times and taking on the work they always wished they had the people for. And Cosmos, which helps providers check a diagnosis and determine the best course of action, powered by a new kind of AI trained on hundreds of millions of patient stories, codified in the language of medicine and drawn from real cases and outcomes.
So EHRs like ours have always evolved, and they will keep evolving. The trick is simple, even if it isn’t easy: stay focused on customers’ unmet needs, apply extreme creativity, execute with urgency, then rinse and repeat. It’s a forever loop.
As you look at Epic’s future, what are some of the most exciting projects you see happening?
Sumit Rana: I’ve already touched upon our AI work, with Agent Factory and Cosmos and the many capabilities behind them, and the networks that keep knitting the healthcare ecosystem closer together. We’re still in the early stages, and that’s the fun part. MyChart, too, keeps evolving, vibrant and growing, with new capabilities like Epic ID, which gives patients a single login across all their MyChart accounts, simplifying access and putting an end to forgotten-password woes.
Another new frontier for us is ERP (Editor’s Note: See our interview about the Epic ERP). Healthcare organizations have long run their clinical systems and their business operations, things like finance, supply chain, and human resources, on entirely separate platforms. Bringing those together on one foundation, alongside the clinical record, is a big deal. And ours is being built specifically for healthcare from the ground up.
Is there a chance you’ll come back to Epic if things with your family evolve?
Sumit Rana: I’m not looking past what’s in front of me right now. My focus is my family, fully. I’ll always care about Epic and be cheering it on.
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