Dive Brief:
- Technology giant IBM has teamed up with top EMR vendor Epic Systems to compete for the Department of Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract.
- The project is intended to replace the current Military Health System and will serve approximately 9.7 million beneficiaries.
- The partnership will take advantage of Epic's widely-used interoperable EMR platform, which currently supports more than 20 billion data transactions to other systems each year. IBM is bringing system integration, change management and expertise at providing large-scale solutions in partnerships to the table.
Dive Insight:
Given their respective reputations, IBM and Epic have as good a chance as any at capturing this huge DoD contract. But they'd better take care. The DoD has a poor track record for executing health IT projects, and even giants like Epic and IBM could get bogged down in the bureaucracy in trying to deliver services. They had best be prepared to deal with leaders who may not be sure what they want.