PwC Pitches Open-Source Electronic Health Records

One of the entrants in the military's $11 billion electronic health record procurement is proudly flying the open source flag. The group led by PricewaterhouseCoopers includes General Dynamics IT and two open source health record providers whose products are based on the open source Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) -- DSS Inc. and MedSphere. In a sense, their bid harks back to long-standing plans between DOD and VA to cooperate on an integrated electronic heath record...

According to PWC's Dan Garrett, who heads the firm's Health IT practice, the VistA solution makes sense in the short term because of existing interoperability between DOD and VA, and in the long term because the open architecture of VistA gives DOD the ability to modernize at its own pace.

As VistA record providers, DSS and MedSphere are members of the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA). They participate in a collaborative, open-source development environment that allows for health record applications or modules to run on a plug-and-play basis across member systems. Under the terms of PwC's proposed Defense Operational Readiness Health System product, Military Health System users would be able to select applications from across the OSEHRA ecosystem...