Epic Medical Records Firm Drops Google Cloud Integrations

Epic Systems is telling clients that it will not seek further Google Cloud integration and will instead focus on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), CNBC reported.

The company decided to stop development with Google Cloud as it wasn’t experiencing enough interest among its health system clients to justify the investment.

Epic, which is privately held, is one of the biggest electronic medical record firms in the U.S. It offers its products to the biggest U.S. hospital systems, and its installations are a large endeavor. They can come at an overall cost of billions of dollars. They turn into a fundamental part of a hospital’s information systems once they are installed and are rarely dislodged.

According to unnamed sources cited in the report, Epic has been calling its clients over the past few weeks to tell them of the change. Calls were directed to hospital customers that tap into the cloud-based technology of Google either for data storage, medical research, or basic IT operations with the inclusion of file sharing.

“We invest substantial time and engineering effort in evaluating and understanding the infrastructure Epic runs on,” said Seth Hain, Epic’s vice president of research and development. “Scalability, reliability and security are important factors we consider when evaluating these underlying technologies.”

Hain said the firm focuses on supporting “infrastructure the Epic community uses today and is likely to use in the future.”

In separate news, a report surfaced last year that Google was collecting and using millions of people’s healthcare data without telling them. The company was calling the endeavor “Project Nightingale,” and it was said to involve information from millions across 21 states.

The company was working on the project with help from St. Louis-based healthcare system Ascension, which is the second biggest in the country. The data collected included diagnoses, hospitalization records, and lab results.