Google has joined PwC in its bid for the $11bn US Department of Defense (DoD) Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) Electronic Health Record (EHR) contract.
The latest move follows a business partnership between the two companies last October to jointly compete for major projects, leveraging PwC’s consulting experience and Google’s Cloud technologies.
The PwC product, called the Defense Operational Readiness Health System (DORHS), will help upgrade the military health system by enabling doctors and healthcare experts to treat service members and their families through a single source of medical records.
PwC global and US public sector leader Scott McIntyre said: "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.
"Google can assist us in delivering a cost-effective and efficient solution to serve the healthcare needs of our military."
As part of the bid, Google and PwC will compete against other enterprise-technology providers such as HP, IBM and CSC. The winner of the contract will be announced by late June.
The upgrade programme is aimed at replacing the DoD’s existing Military Health System (MHS), currently supporting around 10 million people, including both active duty and retired military personnel.
PwC’s system integrates open source software from the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance, thus claiming to offer a cost-efficient, highly interoperable EHR system.
PwC Health IT Leader Dan Garrett said: "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."
"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."
