Dive Brief:
- Global consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has thrown its hat into the ring as a contender for the Department of Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization Electronic Health Record contract. The DHMSM contract would replace and improve the Military Health System, which currently supports more than 9.7 million beneficiaries.
- In its proposal, PwC is working with commercial EHR vendors DSS Inc. and MedSphere, along with systems integrator General Dynamics Information Technology. The group plans take advantage of investments already made in open source health IT by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance by merging open source software with commercial applications.
- The group is offering an EHR currently serving patients and clinicians in more than 2,300 locations across the world.
Dive Insight:
Not surprisingly, for a contract with an expected value of about $11 billion, the PwC group is far from the only giant tech alliance interested in capturing this business. For example, IBM and EHR behemoth Epic Systems are working together to fight for the contract as well, with Epic's massive market share in the private commercial market helping to position the two as major contenders for the contract.
However, even partnerships with this level of firepower are likely to struggle with the DOD's history of failure at accomplishing his health IT objectives. For example, data gaps and other problems arise for more than half of the DOD's almost 10 million beneficiaries who step outside of the DOD network.
Regardless, the competition for this contract is likely to be fierce, even if the work involved requires participants to fix a lot that's broken. It will be fascinating to see whether even the giants of the industry can create a coherent, modern system for the DOD.