Wal-Mart to Enter EHR Market

BENTONVILLE, Ark. — This spring, Wal-Mart plans to begin offering
low-cost electronic health records systems to physicians,

company officials told the New York Times last week.
The company’s Sam’s Club division will partner
with Dell
computers and software company EClinicalWorks to offer the
service. Dell will furnish the docs with a desktop or tablet
personal computer, while eClinicalWorks will provide the EHR and
practice management software for patient billing.

According to the Times report, the nation’s largest
retailer will use its buying power to secure discounts on the
software and hardware, resulting in an initial cost to set up the
EHR system of less than $25,000 for the first physician and about
$10,000 for each additional physician in a practice.

While President Bush called for electronic health records for
all Americans by 2014, many physicians have been reluctant to make
the switch (see The eHealth Connection,
HomeCare, August 2005). But Wal-Mart officials said their
new EHR initiative would make it more accessible and cost-efficient
for physicians to adopt health care IT because they could charge as
much as 50 percent less than other health IT providers, the
Times report said. In addition, the Obama administration
is encouraging doctors to switch to electronic records with $19
billion in incentives in the economic stimulus package.