Epic Joins IBM To Pitch DoD Contract

Hoping to be the lucky vendors that win a massive pending DoD deal, Epic Systems has team up with global technology giant IBM to compete for the DoD’s Healthcare’s Management Systems Modernization contract.

The new project comes after years of  struggles and changes of direction by the DoD, which has worked for years to integrate its system with the VA’s EMR. Back in 2009, the two giant federal agencies kicked off an effort to create an integrated medical record, the iEHR, which would offer every service member the ability to maintain a single EMR throughout their career and lifetime. But those efforts failed miserably, and the iEHR project was halted in February 2013.

Since then, the DoD has announced that it’s moving along with its iEHR plans once again, a sprawling project which the Interagency Program Office estimates the cost somewhere between $8 billion and $12 billion.

Meanwhile, the DoD Healthcare Management Systems Modernization is moving ahead, slated to replace the current Military Health System. The DHMSM should serve some 9.7 million beneficiaries.

The two partners certainly bring a strong bench to the table. Epic offers an interoperable platform which is one of the most adopted EMR systems in the country, and according to company officials,its open architecture supports more than 20 billion data transactions between systems every year.  Epic says that its customer community, which currently includes 100 million patients, exchanges more than 2.2 million records each month with of the EMR vendors, HISPs, HIEs, the VA, DoD and Social Security Administration.

IBM, meanwhile,is contributing its system integration, change management and expertise , ad experiments in delivering large-scale solutions in partnership with complementary software and services providers. IBM’s Federal Healthcare practice will lead the effort, backed by IBM global information technology,research and health care organizations which already collaborate with Epic in support of EMR solutions internationally.

Without a doubt, IBM is the grandfather of all big iron providers, so they don’t have a lot to prove.  And Epic is a clear leader in the enterprise EMR space, by some measures leading the pack by a considerable margin. It’s likely they’re a top contender for the job.

If the DoD does indeed choose the partnership of Epic and IBM to make its health IT transition, it seems likely that they’ll have recruited more than enough firepower to get the job done — though there’s always the question of whether Epic, which is used to bossing hospitals around, will function as well when the big bureaucracy of the DoD is calling the shots.

But what’s more worrisome is whether the DoD will work effectively with these two private sector companies, assuming t hey win the bid. As noted, the DoD’s track record with change management is nothing to write home about, to say the least, and bureaucratic waffling could conceivably undermine even the most expert efforts to bring DoD’s healthcare architecture into the future. As big and powerful as they are, IBM and Epic may be in for one heckuva ride. In fact, John’s even suggested that the best thing for Epic might be for them to not win the DoD EHR contract.