With Google Cloud, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will help developers establish new apps and tools to improve veterans' access to VA services and data. 
 
According to VA, the partnership will help scale its Lighthouse API program, which provides access to VA application programming interfaces (APIs) for developing new apps.

Veterans and their families get health care benefits at the VA's 170 health centers and 1,000 outpatient centers.

Apigee, Google Cloud's API management platform, VA will deploy as part of the partnership. For example, developers can leverage Apigee to create applications that help veterans submit electronic claims, track them and add supplemental documents, according to a press release from the organization. 

Additionally, developers can use the VA's health APIs to create new online tools that help veterans find their healthcare papers and control their health.

The VA is building a "digital-first" customer experience for veterans, and the Google partnership contributes to that goal, VA officials said.

The Office of Information and Technology at the VA launched the Lighthouse API in 2018 as a platform for third-party developers to make health apps that veterans can download and use on-demand to help manage their health care.
In addition to complying with FedRAMP regulations and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources regulations, Apigee's FedRAMP-certified platform will enable the VA to safeguard veteran data.

In 2016, Google acquired Apigee for $625 million. Google Cloud, which is competing with Amazon API Gateway and other API management players as big tech companies move deeper into healthcare, is now competing with Amazon. 

Venture Beat reports that Amazon holds a 41% share of the cloud infrastructure market and will achieve a revenue rate of $54 billion in 2021, making it one of Google Cloud Apigee's most significant competitors.