Two summers ago, it won the right to bid on a $12 billion IT procurement by the Veterans Affairs Department for its healthcare and benefits divisions, including cyber security work.
Booz recently received four federal management consulting and/or IT contracts, including two totaling $32 million with the CMS, and another for $18.5 million with the National Institutes of Health.
Booz has had a health IT privacy and security practice for years, too.
In 2008, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology hired Booz for $450,000 to assess the national medical identity theft problem.
Last month, Booz signed a $2.5 million, five-year deal with the NIH to advise it on healthcare data and security in research.
"People must feel comfortable in providing researchers access to personal health information, knowing that their privacy will be ensured—it's critical for the NIH to accomplish its mission," Booz Allen Senior Vice President Andrea Inserra said in a news release.
More than a decade ago, Dr. William Winkenwerder, a former president of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, soon to become the top doc at the Military Health System, made a prediction in his keynote speech at the TEPR conference in Boston.
"I think privacy and security are the Chernobyl that is waiting to happen for the healthcare industry," Winkenwerder said. “The right to privacy is … embedded in our culture. Privacy is going to be our greatest hurdle, and we must protect it in order to succeed."
So far, there's been a lot of steam wafting from that direction, but no health privacy meltdown sufficiently egregious to motivate a mass of people to try and do something about it. The same could be said about popular inaction over previous intermittent leaks about government surveillance programs tapping databases and the nation's fiber optic grid.
Snowden has made no mention in his recent revelations that medical records were captured in the NSA's dragnet searches, though medical records have been targeted by the intelligence community in the past, according to two official reports about an earlier domestic surveillance program called Total Information Awareness.
Meanwhile, Glenn Greenwald, the former constitutional lawyer turned author and blogger for the Guardian news organization in London who helped introduce Snowden's information to the world, says “there's a lot more coming.”
Follow Joseph Conn on Twitter: @MHJConn
