IBM Joins Forces with Epic to Bid for Department of Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization Contract

Aims to Transform U.S. Military Health System for America's Active Duty Members, Retirees and Families

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Jun 10, 2014, 03:30 ET

WASHINGTON, June 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that it will team with Epic, the market-leading provider of electronic health records (EHR), to compete for the Department of Defense Healthcare Management Systems Modernization (DHMSM) contract. With 9.7 million beneficiaries, including active duty, retirees and their dependents, DHMSM will replace and modernize the Military Health System (MHS) clinical systems.

IBM and Epic will propose a solution to transform the MHS leveraging Epic's high performance, interoperable and secure EHR software which is used by a majority of the U.S.'s healthcare leaders including Johns Hopkins Medicine, Partners HealthCare, Cleveland Clinic and Kaiser Permanente. The combination of IBM and Epic brings complementary strengths and track-records of delivering successful on-time, on-budget projects to large multi-regional healthcare organizations that match the MHS in size and project scope.

"Service members, their families and the healthcare providers who care for them deserve the best healthcare our country can provide. They would benefit from an integrated system that leverages best practices from other large and successful healthcare organizations," said Carl Dvorak, President, Epic "We would be honored to be part of the solution to modernize the MHS. In collaboration with IBM, we can provide a successful implementation that will support innovation and interoperability within military healthcare."

IBM will bring its system integration, change management and operational expertise in delivering large-scale transformational solutions alongside a broad-range of complementary software and services providers. Epic adds the nation's most widely adopted, highest rated and most scalable enterprise health IT suite with an open architecture supporting over 20 billion data transactions to other third party systems each year.

Members of the Epic customer community have been pioneers in medical record adoption and integration, and providing patients with online access to their records, providers and schedules. They also lead the nation in exchanging patient records between care settings. Covering about 100 million patients, the Epic customer community exchanges 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 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Department of Defense (DoD), and the Social Security Administration (SSA).

The team will be led by IBM's Federal Healthcare practice and backed by the IBM global information technology, research and healthcare organizations, which work with Epic today in support of EHR solutions around the world. IBM's healthcare team includes more than 300 federal healthcare consultants and dozens of medical doctors and healthcare professionals who are focused on healthcare systems transformation. Also, IBM recently expanded its Federal Healthcare practice delivering big data and cognitive computing solutions, including technology from the IBM Watson Group, to federal healthcare clients to help aggregate and analyze clinical information to improve care and reduce costs.

"Our collaboration with Epic for DHMSM was a natural extension of our global partnership," said Andy Maner, Managing Partner, IBM US Federal. "Together we understand that we must step forward and bring our best to improve health outcomes for those who proudly serve our nation. Improving quality of care and reductions to the overall costs for our military will be our primary goal. This is going to require bringing a physician's mindset, proven past performance and a commitment to innovation."

IBM's Chief Medical Information Officer, Dr. Keith Salzman, will lead the collaboration between IBM and Epic. Dr. Salzman brings more than two decades of experience in delivering quality care to patients, driving the use of medical informatics within the MHS and exchanging data and documents through interoperability between the DoD and VA systems. "With DHMSM, we have the opportunity to begin a historic transformational journey for the DoD, and pave the way for the modernization of the entire ecosystem of healthcare delivery for our nation," said Dr. Salzman.

IBM and Healthcare:
IBM works with hospitals, health systems and life sciences companies to create smarter, more connected healthcare systems. IBM's technologies and consulting services help organizations deliver better care with fewer mistakes, predict and prevent diseases, speed up medical discovery and empower people to make better choices. Big Data innovations such as IBM Watson and "stream computing" are being used to improve patient outcomes for more personalized and patient-centric care.

IBM has a 75 year history of working with clinicians, researchers and public health organizations to help improve patient care. Recently, IBM has partnered with a range of healthcare organizations to apply Watson in ways that are helping transform how medicine is practiced, paid for and taught.

Contact:
Michael Rowinski
IBM Corporation
720-395-8497
[email protected]

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SOURCE IBM