Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Wal-Mart selling its own EMR

And we thought that a clinic in a drug store was bad enough:

The blue coats with the yellow smiley faces are extra.

First of all..this is an attempt to grab a piece of the billions that will come from the Govt. with almost monopolistic presence of Walmart in the business area. I am sure they will be able to somehow tie this deal with the Govt. to have a controlled selling channel, thereby making it very difficult for other players to compete.

Secondly...I don't see a huge price differential in Walmart pacage vs. if you were to buy it independently the same. The article in NYT says, it will be a ASP model which in reality, eClinicalworks sells it way cheaper than that. Infact, you don't have to pay the initial $10,000 license fee, and rather pay a monthly subscription fee.

I guess we don't have all the details of this offering but it will be interesting to see it once is available. Even if the price offers any attraction, I will be vary of ASP model of data storage.

Just my two cents...

Is it on the $4 generic list?

This doesn't sound like a good deal for physicians, at least not yet. Good deal for Wal-Mart though.

$25,000 for the first physician and $5000/yr is NOT a low cost EMR. It's all in the spin.

It's all in the spin. Yep. eClinical IS A TERRIBLE PRODUCT. OOPS did I say that?

It is built on using VB6 with a MySQL (there's that word again) backend. I evaluated it, and when asked if you could transfer records between to eClinical apps, I was told "we don't export or import anything." If fell off my list. There are no plans to move to a newer platform either.

But folks seriously, with $45,000 of incentives PER PROVIDER, how long did we think it would be before there is an ALL OUT WAR to capture market share?

Letterman ought to be able to get a top 10 list out of this one!

But wait, did you see that blue light special? ... better snap it up now.

I think everyone will be working on trying to get their slice of the $45,000 pie (stimulus is the current buzzword). Unfortunately in the long run that free money will cost all of us..... I just hope that those of us who have already done EMR's, refining various things might actually get something out of the deal. I actually think most will end up going to huge practices or even insurance companies (like Kaiser) and will do very little for most of America.