Dive Brief:
- PwC has confirmed that Google is acting as partner in its bid for the $11-billion Department of Defense EHR contract. The team's solution is based on an open-source version of the Vista EHR used by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
- PwC says Google has always been a part of the bid, named the Defense Operational Readiness Health System. The tech giant will help provide infrastructure, including "cloud, security, storage, networking, and enterprise search capabilities," according to Modern Healthcare.
- Google can assist us in delivering a cost-effective and efficient solution to serve the healthcare needs of our military," PwC Global and US Public Sector Leader Scott McIntyre said.
Dive Insight:
This adds some pretty significant muscle to the PwC offering. Not that the other groups are anything to sneeze at, but Google is nearly always the sexiest tech brand in the room. PwC health IT practice leader Dan Garrett told Modern Healthcare that Google brings its extensive search engine tools to their offering, allowing physicians to search for all patients with a particular condition, then draw correlations between patients with that disorder and comorbidities.
This kind of capability is "population management in its purest definition," Garrett told MH.
Stay tuned: The contract is set to be awarded in June. Other competing groups include a partnership between EMR vendor Epic Systems and IBM; a team including defense contractor and systems integrator Computer Sciences Corp., Hewlett Packard and EMR vendor Allscripts; and a group including EMR vendor Cerner, government systems integrator Leidos and Accenture Federal. Other partners in the PwC group include General Dynamics Information Technology and MedSphere.