Google, PwC Bidding for $11B DoD Health System Modernization Project

Jaikumar Vijayan | eWeek | January 18, 2015

Google will assist in delivering innovative and cost-efficient EHR for the Defense Department, PwC says.

When Google and PricewaterhouseCoopers announced a business partnership last October, they described the move as an effort to jointly compete for large projects leveraging PwC's consulting experience and Google's Cloud Platform technologies. Last week, the two companies followed through on that announcement with PwC including Google in a team that is bidding for a massive $11 billion health system modernization effort at the U.S. Department of Defense.

If PwC secures the contract, Google will be part of a group of vendors that will assist PwC with building a Defense Operational Readiness Health System (DORHS) that the consulting giant says meets the DoD's goals of modernizing its health system. At the core of the proposed system is open source software from the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance that PwC says will offer a cost-efficient, highly interoperable EHR system that will also prevent the DoD from being locked into a single vendor.

With the announcement, Google joins a team that includes General Dynamics, Medsphere Systems Corporation, MedicaSoft and DSS, Inc. that are all part of PwC's bid for the DoD project. "Google is known for its expertise in innovative, secure and open technologies, and the power of Internet scale," said Scott McIntyre, PwC's Global and U.S. Public Sector Leader in a statement. Google's cloud technology-set and capabilities complements PwCs proposed open architecture EHR system, McIntyre said...