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Epic Systems: Wizards won’t modernize health care, and Wikipedia pages don’t edit themselves.

By Ken Glueck, Executive Vice President, Oracle—Feb 11, 2025

A little over three years ago Oracle bought Cerner Corporation sending shockwaves through the Electronic Health Records (EHR) market, particularly market-leader Epic Systems. Oracle jumped into this market because we understand that doctors and patients need modern technology, not Hogwarts and Wizards. We focused on securing the health care system from illicit actors. We set on a path to build a modern EHR Cloud, focused on innovation while Epic built a yellow brick road to nowhere. At Epic, product demos were replaced by campus tours, reserve your spot here. And Oracle embraced interoperability, so clinicians were not shackled to a walled garden in Verona, Wisconsin.

Epic’s response should be to out-innovate, out-invest, and beat Oracle to the cloud and AI in EHRs. Instead, it appears Epic was busy orchestrating another kind of campaign from its tree house in the sky. Consumed with a highly curated image machine, Epic CEO Judy Faulkner focused more on self-accolades than products, which is apparent based on her consuming focus on editing the Epic Wikipedia page (something which, btw, violates Wikipedia’s rules).

But she didn’t stop there. It appears Epic Systems not only curated its own image, but stealthily turned its PR machine on Seema Verma, Executive Vice President and General Manager at Oracle Health and Life Sciences. Ms. Verma is the head of Oracle Health and therefore the commercial peer to Epic CEO Judy Faulkner. Rather than out-innovate her competitors, Ms. Faulkner turned her magic wand on a bit of a smear campaign against her biggest rival.

There’s a non-fiction “backstory” to Ms. Faulkner and Ms. Verma’s relationship (it’s kind of like Wicked™, so Ms. Faulkner can follow along). Ms. Faulkner vehemently opposed Ms. Verma’s push for EHR interoperability while Ms. Verma served as Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.1 Ms. Verma proposed rules around interoperability and data sharing that were starkly at odds with Epic’s corporate interests which are to protect Epic’s dominant position.2 Efforts to kill interoperability and Ms. Verma’s proposals were led by Epic’s chief lobbyist Ladd Wiley.3

Ms. Faulkner, it turns out, is for her own flavor of interoperability. She loves interoperability so long as it means everything interoperates around Epic Systems. Real, open, interoperable systems, not so much. Watch what she does, not what she says.

And because opposing interoperability is like rooting against Hermione Granger, it appears Ms. Faulkner has been coordinating a deliberate behind-the-scenes campaign to disparage Ms. Verma. This campaign, orchestrated through sophisticated, anonymous editing of Wikipedia pages, has focused on discrediting Ms. Verma and damaging her reputation as she transitioned into her role leading Oracle Health.

The campaign against Ms. Verma began in earnest on January 29, 2021, with a spree of Wikipedia edits aimed at introducing misleading and damaging information about her. We couldn’t help but notice how interesting it was that neutral Wikipedia editors seemed so focused on only positive edits to the Epic Systems Wikipedia page and suddenly there’s a barrage of sophisticated, negative edits to Ms. Verma’s page.

It took this author less than a week to figure out what was going on using little more than the internet and public audit logs. Turns out the edits to Ms. Verma’s page originated from a static IP address managed by the Washington Airports Authority, suggesting the editor deliberately exploited a public Wi-Fi network to mask their identity. Over the course of seven edits, the anonymous user systematically introduced only negative claims about Ms. Verma’s professional reputation. These edits were so transparently biased and unfounded that many were reversed by neutral Wikipedia moderators.

The editor demonstrated a working knowledge of internal personnel dynamics within the Department of Health and Human Services. Beyond the attacks on Ms. Verma, the same editor made a single, seemingly innocuous edit to the Wikipedia page of former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, adding the name of his first deputy, who had recently joined Akin Gump’s healthcare lobbying practice.

Akin Gump is a law firm where Epic Systems’ head of government affairs, Ladd Wiley, worked for over twelve years. Mr. Wiley himself has a long track record of well-documented lobbying activities at HHS and CMS. By or about 2021, Ladd Wiley joined Epic Systems as Head of Public Policy. At the time Mr. Wiley joined Epic Systems, the defamatory attacks against Ms. Verma evolved into a more sophisticated, coordinated, and sustained effort—indicative of a professionally funded campaign to harm Ms. Verma’s reputation.

The editing patterns of Ms. Verma’s page became increasingly systematic and calculated, employing a narrative designed to undermine Ms. Verma’s credibility and professional standing. The linguistic patterns, timing, and content focus across these edits are unmistakably consistent, leaving little doubt that this was a deliberate effort to undermine Ms. Verma’s professional standing by the same person or group of persons.

A significant and troubling escalation occurred in December 2023 when Ms. Verma’s Wikipedia page was locked for editing by anonymous IP addresses due to repeated edits aimed at discrediting her.

Immediately following the lock, a new Wikipedia user, “Lacassal,” emerged and resumed making edits nearly identical in tone, style, and content to those previously made by the anonymous IP addresses during the preceding two and half years. The linguistic similarities, including repeated phrases and distinct stylistic choices, strongly suggest that the same individual or coordinated group was responsible for both sets of edits.

So, we wondered, what or who in the world is a “Lacassal”? A quick review of the user “Lacassal” reveals compelling evidence linking the account to Eric D. Hargan, former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and his lobbying and public affairs firm, The Hargan Group.

Lacassal’s edits demonstrated an intimate familiarity with Ms. Verma’s tenure at CMS, including obscure details and internal matters that would not be readily known to casual editors or the general public. Interestingly the only positive edit made by “Lacassal” during this period was to Mr. Hargan’s own Wikipedia page, where “Lacassal” added “Hargan Strategies” to his employment history.

“Lacassal” appears to stand for Lac ‘Assal, or Lake Assal in Djibouti Africa, an area intimately familiar to Mr. Hargan for its outbreak of COVID impacting the U.S. military’s Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, which Mr. Hargan worked on while Deputy Secretary of HHS.

Author’s Note: We acknowledge it is possible that an independent, neutral Wikipedia editor not associated with Mr. Hargan (or not Mr. Hargan) edited both Ms. Verma’s page and the page of Hargan Strategies (and nothing else) and is also familiar (as is Mr. Hargan) with a lake in central-western Djibouti.

The connection between Mr. Hargan and Epic Systems provides further evidence of coordination. As a former Deputy Secretary of HHS, Mr. Hargan has deep and longstanding ties to Epic Systems and its key figures, particularly Mr. Wiley. Mr. Hargan and Mr. Wiley have known each other for at least 15 years, having co-founded the Coalition to Protect Patient Rights (CPPR) in 2009. CPPR, a nonprofit to influence healthcare policy, worked extensively to oppose the Affordable Care Act through so-called “astroturfing” campaigns and other public relations efforts.

In October 2020, Mr. Hargan visited the Epic Systems headquarters in Wisconsin to meet with senior leadership, including Ms. Faulkner, to discuss health information systems and data interoperability—critical topics for Epic’s market position. This meeting occurred while Epic was lobbying for regulatory changes, including efforts to influence interoperability standards and HIPAA regulations. Mr. Hargan’s well-known (at least within our small community) public actions at HHS, including his advocacy for HIPAA reforms that aligned with Epic’s interests, suggest a close working alignment.

The sophistication of the disparaging edits, many of which involved subtle but damaging changes to Ms. Verma’s biography, align with the known activities of The Hargan Group, a public affairs firm specializing in strategic communications for healthcare clients. Such efforts demonstrate a deliberate and calculated attempt to harm Oracle Health’s credibility by targeting its most senior executive.

It seems implausible that Mr. Hargan, who owns and runs a small Public Relations and Lobbying firm, would engage in a campaign to discredit Oracle Health without a paying client behind the scenes. If that client is, in fact, Judy Faulkner then she really needs to refocus her efforts on innovation and not image curation.

The news here is that Harry Potter wasn’t actually real and it’s going to take a lot more than magic to modernize medicine. Clinicians and patients deserve investment and innovation; cloud and AI; interoperability and ease of use, not the surreptitious editing of competitors’ Wikipedia pages.

1 https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/strategy/verma-scolds-bad-actors-opposing-interoperability
2 https://www.digitalhealth.net/2020/01/faulkner-squares-up-for-epic-interoperability-fight/
3 https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/tech/cms-seema-verma-throws-shade-at-epic-and