CSC, Allscripts and HP Join to Battle Epic-IBM for multi-billion-dollar government contract

Falls Church, Virgina-based health information technology (IT) company CSC has announced that it will team with electronic health record (EHR) developer Allscripts and technology giant HP to make a grab for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Healthcare Management System Modernization (DHMSM) contract that may end up being worth billions.

How many billions it will be worth depends in part on the actions of Congress, which has been critical of the DoD’s previous efforts to create a modern EHR system. Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a Veterans Affairs (VA) appropriations bill that holds back 75 percent of the VA’s healthcare IT funding until the VA and the DoD work out a plan that will allow their electronic health records systems to become interoperable and end the current situation where the clinical information of active duty military cannot follow along with them as they transition to the VA.

In its press release, CSC said it “intends to deliver a secure, enterprise-wide information technology (IT) solution that joins multiple disparate military health information systems into a single, open, interoperable and extensible platform that seamlessly connects patients and providers.”

However, the CSC, Allscrips and HP alliance faces a formidable competitor in Epic and IBM. Epic, the famously private, EHR developer based in Verona, Wisconsin, already claims to be the leading EHR system in the United States both in terms of patients with Epic EHR records and in terms of records exchanged between providers. According to an IBM press release, hospitals and healthcare systems running Epic already exchange “over 2.2 million records a month with other EHRs, health information service providers (HISPs), health information exchanges (HIEs), and groups on the eHealth Exchange such as the VA, the DoD and the Social Security Administration. Meanwhile, IBM is a leader in big data and cognitive computing solutions, and famous for its Watson stream computing solution.

The DoD is currently in the draft request for proposal (RFP) stage, but once comments are collected and a final RFP is issued, competition for the contract may begin in earnest.