Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has joined the team of companies led by PwC that is bidding for a multibillion dollar contract to build a new electronic health records system for the U.S. military.
PwC said Thursday Google becomes the sixth company to join a team that also includes commercial EHR vendors DSS and Medsphere, MedicaSoft and General Dynamics (NYSE: GD).
The team’s proposal — named the Defense Operational Readiness Health System — is designed as an open source EHR setup that is intended to avoid dependence on a single technology, PwC says.
“Google is known for its expertise in innovative, secure and open technologies, and the power of Internet scale, ” said Scott McIntyre, head of the U.S. and global public sectors at PwC.
DORHS would function as a single source of medical records for the Military Health System and both and healthcare workers inside and outside the government would have access to that system, according to PwC.
Dan Garrett, health IT leader at PwC, said the team’s proposal aims to help “reduce the time it takes to adopt and train on a new system” and “eliminate technical complexities that usually are the cause of unnecessary ‘budget creep’ and schedule slippages.”
The PwC-led team is one of four consortiums that are competing for the Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization contract.
One of those groups — the team of IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Epic –Â announced this week it formed an advisory group to assist the team’s pursuit of the DHMSM program.
