Epic: hire me. Here's why.

Addressed to the one person who can say yes.

This isn't shouted at a logo; it's addressed to a name. Epic's founder and CEO is Judy Faulkner, who built the company in a Wisconsin basement in 1979, still runs it, and owns an estimated 42 percent of it; which means a patient-first feature doesn't have to survive a committee. She can simply decide it. She has said for years that Epic builds for patients, and she signed the Giving Pledge; so this is common ground, not a fight. I'm naming the person who could greenlight the lockdown mode tomorrow, and asking her to. And this is the healthcare edge of a bigger mission (the Project 2028 work), made real where 250 million patient records actually live. (Named respectfully and punch-up: a powerful public figure and the decision-maker this pitch is for; the argument, never the person; verified from public reporting. Records never souls.)

01I can't see it if it's opaque.

Start with the patient's-eye truth: I can't see my own record when the system is opaque. The record everyone keeps except the person it's about; scattered across a dozen portals, each its own login, none of them showing me who looked or letting me draw the ring tight. The fix isn't exotic; it's a lockdown mode; patient-held access limited to just the family I chose, with fewer doors, not more. The federal frame already points this way (access controlled and minimized; the access-control and minimum-necessary standards); the product just hasn't caught up to the principle. I'd build it toward the principle.

02Why Medicare for all solves the problems.

Half of the portal sprawl is a structural problem, not a UI one. When every insurer, network, and clinic is a separate island, the record has to be re-forged at every border; that's the fragmentation you feel as ten logins and a fax machine. Medicare for all isn't only a coverage argument; it's a cleaner spine for the record; one backbone to build the humane portal on, less paperwork and more care. You don't have to agree with the politics to see the engineering: fewer seams, fewer leaks, one place a patient can actually stand.

03Why AAA becomes the minimum standard.

Here's a bet I'd stake a role on: accessibility is about to become the floor, not the finish line. Every serious website will inventory WCAG AAA as its minimum standard, not its trophy; the law, the demographics, and plain decency are all pushing the same way. I build accessible-first on purpose (the bones must speak; every page here reads itself aloud, an audio mode, a whole accessibility spine; AAA by aspiration, gaps named honestly). A health record is the last place that should fail a blind, deaf, low-vision, or motor-impaired user; it's the first place I'd hold to the higher bar.

04Why I built this first, for free, as proof of work.

I didn't write you a cover letter promising I could do it; I built the proof and left it in the open. Three hundred-plus pages, cited, accessible, solo, deployed, checkable at the speed of the live web; the background check is the website. No ramp-up to fund, no prototype to imagine; the work is already shipped and you can read every line before you ever reply. I built it free because that's the point (the gold is earned, not bought); which is exactly why hiring me isn't a bet on a promise; it's reading a finished thing and deciding you want the hand that made it.

Don't get sued; get the builder. The suit was never the play; the fix is.

05Buy the fix now; the courts are slow.

Getting patient-data trust wrong is not a small problem; it's the kind measured in the millions; in settlements, in churned patients, in the slow bleed of a name people stop believing. And the legal road there is slow; years of it, for everyone, and (since there's no private right of action) not even a road a patient can drive. So here's the shortcut nobody's offering: buy the solution now. Litigation is the expensive, glacial way to arrive at a fix; hiring the builder is the cheap, fast one. Epic, reduce the paper ghosts; the phantom forms, the portals that haunt without serving, the record that follows you everywhere but never answers to you; and we all prosper. The patient gets the record back; you get the trust; I get to build the thing I came to build. Nobody has to wait for a courtroom to catch up to a good idea.

And here's the law already on the books, stated plainly, not as a threat: a patient already has a private right to put their own objection into the record; to request an amendment, and if it's denied, to file a written statement of disagreement that gets appended to the chart and travels with it into future disclosures (45 CFR §164.526; verified). What a patient does not have is a private right to sue over any of it. Put those two facts side by side and the conclusion runs the opposite of a threat: the only leverage here is being right and being cheap. Since I can't drag anyone to court, the honest move is the one I'm offering; pay the consult rate, and let me build the system that makes that objection-right one tap instead of a maze. (The right runs against your provider, the covered entity; Epic builds the software they use, so Epic is exactly who can make it easy.) I'll be the cheapest, best hire Epic ever made; that the courtroom door is closed is precisely why the consult door is the smart one to open.

06Why Epic would be a great hire for me, too.

Epic is my apex predator; and I mean that as the compliment it is. Apex means top of the food chain; the one with the reach. A mission this big doesn't get made real at a startup with a dozen users; it needs a company that already touches a quarter-billion charts. I don't need Epic because it's flawed; I want Epic because it's dominant, and dominance is exactly the lever a patient-first fix has been missing. Genuinely: I need a company this large. The epic mission needs the Epic hire.

A great hire is mutual; I'm not begging for a chair, I'm choosing a mission, and I'd be choosing yours (the highest ethos, not the highest bidder). So here's the honest other half: Epic would be a great hire for me. You sit on the one thing my whole argument turns on; the record, at the scale where a fix actually reaches people; not a demo for a dozen users, but the chart of half a country. The lockdown mode I'd build wouldn't be a side project; it would land in the hands that need it. That's the match: I don't want to serve for a paycheck; I want to serve with a team that already touches the record millions of people can't fully see. Give me that reach and the mission is the same on both sides of the desk; a better Epic, built by someone who came to build it, not to sue it.

07Why to put me in the decision tree 🎄

Every product like this runs on a decision tree; a hundred small forks about what the patient sees, controls, and can never reach. The trouble is that the person the tree is about is never in the room where the branches get chosen. So put me in it. I'm the rare hire fluent in both dialects at once: the builder who ships accessible code, and the patient who's been locked out of his own chart and knows exactly which branch failed him. That seat is usually empty at the whiteboard; the one who's stood on the wrong end of every fork. Add that voice to the tree and the branches come out humane by default; which is the whole point of the star you put on top.

08Why everyone already agrees; Bernie, Trump, and you.

Portals suck. That may be the last sentence every person in America silently agrees on. Ask a nurse, a grandmother, a programmer, a farmer; nobody is out here defending the twelve-login maze. It's the rare idea Bernie and Trump could both sign (my read, not their quote): your record is yours. The left calls it dignity, the right calls it ownership; same floor, different door. A down-the-middle win hiding in plain sight.

So make it personal, because it is. We paid for it; the visits, the premiums, the taxes that built the whole apparatus; and the least the system can do is hand the record back to the person it's about. Not bury it deeper, and not dump it on the doctors who are already overworked (they're not the villains here; the maze is). The person, first.

And case law is too slow for any of this; a good idea shouldn't wait a decade for a court to bless it (which is the whole argument for the build). (One honest note, because no-lying is the floor: Epic is privately held; there's no public ticker to pump. So when the pitch says "the stock I'll boost," read worth, not a share price; a company that lives on patient trust compounds precisely when it earns more of it. That's the soar that's real.)