Epic ‘tells customers it will cease to work with Google Cloud’

Account representatives from US firm Epic are reported to have called customers to tell them it will not be working with Google Cloud.

Epic’s reps told customers the company would instead focus its energies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, CNBC News has reported.

The company is said to have decided to halt development with Google Cloud because it wasn’t seeing sufficient interest among its health system customers to warrant the investment.

Reports have suggested the calls have been directed at Epic’s hospital customers that use Google’s cloud-based technology either for medical research, data storage or for their basic IT operations, including file-sharing.

The report follow’s Google’s announcement in November 2019 that it is working on a clinical dashboard capable of pulling data from various clinical systems into a unified interface.

The as-yet-unnamed product provides a single login through which doctors can access a unified view of data that would normally spread across different systems.

This includes vitals, labs, medications and notes, as well as scanned documents and faxes.

Rather than a fully-fledged EPR system – which Google representatives have previously suggested the company is not interested in – the demo hints towards an interoperable platform that sits on top of the clinical desktop.