Thomas Kurian, CEO of Alphabet’s Google Cloud, speaks at the Google Cloud Next symposium in San Francisco on April 9, 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Account representatives from Epic Systems, one of the heftiest providers of medical record systems, have started calling customers with a clear message: We will not be maintaining further integrations with Google Cloud.
Epic’s reps told customers the company would instead centre its energies on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. They said the company decided to halt development with Google Cloud because it wasn’t look at sufficient interest among its health system customers to warrant the investment.
The calls have come in the past few weeks, rumoured three people with knowledge of the matter, and were directed to Epic’s hospital customers that use Google’s cloud-based technology either for medical explore, data storage or for their basic IT operations, including file-sharing. These people declined to be named because they were not entitled to speak for their organizations on the matter.
Privately held Epic is one of the largest electronic medical record companies in the U.S. It shop-girls its products, which include a digital equivalent of the traditional doctor’s paper medical chart as well as billing contraptions, into the largest hospital systems in the U.S. Epic installations are major undertakings, and can end up costing billions of dollars overall. At intervals installed, they become a core part of a hospital’s information systems and are seldom dislodged.
Epic’s decision is a throw out to Google’s efforts to find new customer segments for its cloud products, as the company lags well behind Amazon Web Utilizations and Microsoft Azure in market share for cloud computing. The company is hoping to catch up by landing big-name customers such as Mayo Clinic, and by stress and straining its artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities.
The move comes as Google is facing criticism from privacy advocates in the matter of its work with Ascension, one of the largest U.S. health systems. The news broke that a small number of Google staff members had access to Ascension patients’ protected health information after the two organizations signed a deal to move health tidings into Google’s servers. Google has subsequently said that it is “super proud” of this work with Ascension, and that it wants to leverage the data for good to develop technologies to detect disease earlier, as well as a tool for doctors and nurses to multitudinous easily search their medical record systems, including Epic.
Epic declined to comment on Google or any other vendor specifically but commanded it considers several factors when deciding which third-party technology providers to support.
“We invest substantial all at once and engineering effort in evaluating and understanding the infrastructure Epic runs on. Scalability, reliability, and security are important factors we heed when evaluating these underlying technologies,” said Epic’s vice president of research and development, Seth Hain, in a disclosure. He said Epic focuses on supporting “infrastructure the Epic community uses today and is likely to use in the future.”
A spokesperson for Google Cloud run out of steamed to comment on the relationship with Epic.
One of the health system customers who got the call said this could impact their details sharing and aggregation efforts going forward. This person said medical records providers such as Epic and its chief antagonist, Cerner, are picky with data-sharing standards, and withdrawing support for Google would make it risky for the hospital scheme to keep using it.
Epic isn’t alone in its move.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Cerner decisive against pursuing a data-storage relationship with Google despite being offered tens of millions of dollars in impulses. The company was on the hunt for a cloud vendor to help it store 250 million patient medical records. In the end, Cerner go pasted with Amazon.
“We’ve historically seen hospital systems make these decisions independently of their medical accomplishments provider,” said Aneesh Chopra, the president of health-technology company CareJourney and the former chief technology officer of the Partnership States. “It will be interesting to see if Epic’s thumb on the scale moves cloud market share.”