Google Joins PwC DoD EHR Contract Bid
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The two will offer a solution based on an open-source version of the Vista EHR used by the VA.
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
The competition for the $11 billion Department of Defense EHR contract is fierce, and the battle just intensified with the announcement Google will join the PwC team in submitting a bid. According to Healthcare Dive, PwC officials said Google has been involved from the beginning of the process, a plan which they call the Defense Operational Readiness Health System.
A press release explains, “The DHMSM program will replace and modernize the Military Health System (MHS), which currently supports more than 9.7 million beneficiaries, including active duty, retirees and their dependents. The PwC proposal, called the Defense Operational Readiness Health System (DORHS), will help modernize the military health system by enabling doctors and healthcare professionals inside and outside of government to more efficiently treat service members and their families through the creation of a single source for their medical records.”
The Google-PwC partnership makes sense in terms of creating an advanced, cost-effective DORHS solution for the DoD. “Google is known for its expertise in innovative, secure and open technologies, and the power of Internet scale. Their capabilities can complement our proposed open-architecture solution and bring added value, agility and flexibility to the new Military Health System,” Scott McIntyre, PwC's Global and U.S. Public Sector Leader, said in the release. “Google can assist us in delivering a cost-effective and efficient solution to serve the healthcare needs of our military.”
“Our solution is engineered to provide flexibility, cost effectiveness and a platform that will stand the test of time, and does not rely on unproven technologies or proprietary computing platforms,” said PwC's Health IT Leader, Dan Garrett. “We believe that our easy to use solution will reduce the time it takes to adopt and train on a new system, and it will help eliminate technical complexities that usually are the cause of unnecessary 'budget creep' and schedule slippages. Through teaming with our business and technology vendors, such as Google, we will offer the DoD a highly reliable, scalable, interoperable solution that can be implemented on schedule and will enable the innovation needed for the future without being locked into a specific vendor.”
Health IT Outcomes reported on other partnerships that have been formed to compete for the lucrative contract including Cerner, which has partnered with Leidos and Accenture Federal Services to try and win the multibillion-dollar DoD contract to build, install, and configure a replacement EHR system. The 10-year contract would cover 56 hospitals and about 360 clinics serving about 9.7 million beneficiaries from the U.S. military and its dependents.
Both alliances are competing with the partnership of IBM and Epic Systems Corp. Modern Healthcare further reports Computer Sciences Corp., Hewlett-Packard, and Allscripts have announced they would bid for the contract as well.
According to FCW, the bids from PwC and its competitors have already been filed and the announcement of Google’s addition doesn't alter PwC's offering. The contract is set to be awarded in June.