Pentagon EHR System Upgrade Contract Said to Be Worth $11 Billion

The U.S. Department of Defense has narrowed the field to three contenders for the estimated $11 billion upgrade to the DoD EHR:

• Computer Sciences Corp., HP, and Allscripts
• Cerner, Leidos, and Accenture Federal
• IBM, Epic, and Impact Advisors

The winning EHR company will certainly benefit greatly, both from the DoD, and in the healthcare sphere in general, but I'm sure the other two will also benefit from the vote of confidence on their ability to deliver EHR capable of achieving Meaningful Use.

Numerous challenges have been noted by the bidders:

• Interoperability - Allscripts senior vice presi dent, sales, Dean Mericka says interoperability will lead to personalized precision medicine and improved telemedicine.
• DoD mission and culture - Cerner Federal VP and general manager Travis Dalton notes that the task goes far beyond bringing a set of tools. The winning vendor will have to adapt to the DoD's culture, philosophy and mission.
• Scalability - Epic U.S. federal and global services executive Leslie Karls indicates the scalability of the solution is key.

Those are just the EHR perspectives. The IT and infrastructure challenges present a whole other level of difficulties.

Read more at FierceEMR.

The Big Data Challenge

 

Why are companies such as HP, IBM and Oracle spending big money to acquire big data capabilities? Michael Vizard's Slashdot article, "The Multi-Billion-Dollar Data Management Challenge,"shows how serious the quest for Big Data supremacy has become. (Thanks to Jim Harris (@ocdqblog) for passing this along via Twitter.)

As of 2012, the world creates approximately 2.5 quintillion (2.5 x 10¹⁸) bytes of data daily (Wikipedia). The mathematical notation in parentheses is not not redundant, because the definition of "quintillion" varies according to which side of the Atlantic you are standing on. In the US and Canada, a quintillion has 18 zeroes; in the UK, France and Germany, a quintillion has 30 zeroes. That's just a simple example of the difficulty involved in dealing with Big Data.

Volume, variety, velocity and veracity are the four "Vs" of Big Data, but there's one "M" we should mention as well: metadata. Metadata is the key to managing and indexing the massive inflow of data, making accurate operational and competitive intelligence available in a timely manner to your decision makers.

For SAP BusinessObjects platform managers, now is the time to get your own metadata house in order. APOS Insight's enhanced audit and metadata management capabilities can help.