Walmart Connecting Doctors: Capitalizing on EMR stimulus

Walmart in collaboration with Dell and eClinicalWorks are pursuing a strategy to capitalize on the Obama Administration’s new $20 billion electronic medical records (EMR) stimulus efforts. The new investments into healthcare information technology includes providing providers a $40,000 incentive to adopt EMRs in their practices. Walmart will be providing their current Sam’s Club members with hardware, software and on-going support in managing their new systems.

“The Sam’s Club offering will be under $25,000 for the first physician in a practice, and about $10,000 for each additional doctor. After the installation and training, continuing annual costs for maintenance and support will be $4,000 to $6,500 a year, the company estimates. About 200,000 health care providers, mostly doctors, are among Sam Club’s 47 million members.” New York Times

Doing What They Do Best. Walmart is looking to capture medical providers IT solutions from traditional healthcare IT players with cost cutting prices, good value, bundle services with Dell/eClinicalWorks and a local distribution channel in every 10,000 population town in the US. Currently in the medical practice IT market EMR solutions have been fragmented and expensive beyond most small medical practices. Historically, larger healthcare technology companies have not pursued smaller physician practices because of the cost and locations often in rural communities, a market Walmart knows and has captured very well from the consumers point of view–the dollar. Now, that the world’s largest retailer (and one of the few profitable companies in the US during this reccession) has put their sights on converting their 200,000 current Sam’s Club member providers into EMR customers, it maybe a way of jump starting Washington’s EMR efforts while putting some of the stimulus dollar to work.

Will it Work? Well, someone who has been at the nexus of healthcare, technology and public health policy on IT adoption is David Brailer, MD,  former ”Health Information Czar” for Bush Administration commented regarding the approach, “If Wal-Mart is successful, this could be a game-changer.”

 We will keep an eye of the strategy as I am sure The White House will as well.

Take Care,

Michael

_______________________Michael G. Ryan, FACHEChairmanExecutive Impact GroupSan Francisco, CA USAwww.execimpactgroup.com 415-821-9994415-254-9800 (cell)mikeryan@execimpactgroup.com  Linked In:www.linkedin.com/in/mikeryan/  Blogs:http://blogs.healthcare.com/healthcaremusing/        http://trusted.md/columns/new_health_leaderTwitter: http://twitter.com/HealthCareGuru