Sam’s Club to offer bundled solution to link physicians with EHRs, health IT
BENTONVILLE, Ark. Walmart’s Sam’s Club division works on the principle that consumers and small businesses will gobble up steeply discounted bulk goods and services, be they plasma-screen TVs, office supplies or cases of diet soda.
Recently, however, the wholesale retailer has sought out a partner to offer a solution for health information technology, electronic medical records and e-prescribing.
The new partnership is between Sam’s Club and eClinicalWorks, a leading provider of electronic medical record and practice management solutions for doctors and physicians’ practice sites, will offer a solution. The two companies have struck and agreement by which Sam’s will offer complete EHR and PM packages from eClinicalWorks and Dell – including installation, training and maintenance – for what Walmart is describing as bargain-basement prices.
Sam’s will reportedly begin offering the solution in the spring to doctors who are members of its warehouse club program. The package will be a turnkey solution that will bundle eClinicalWorks software with a Dell laptop or desktop computer and tech support.
The bundled package will allow individual physicians or full-scale clinics to adopt health IT and link with electronic health networks – including electronic prescribing networks – at as little as half the cost of purchasing each component separately, according to eClinicalWorks.
The reported price will be under $25,000 for purchase and installation by a single doctor, with additional packages costing $10,000 per practice. Additional costs for support and maintenance could range from $4,000 to more than $6,000 annually, according to HISTalk, a web site devoted to news and opinion on health IT.
In an interview with The New York Times, Wal-Mart’s senior director of healthcare business development, Marcus Osborne, was quoted as saying, “We’re a high-volume, low-cost company and I would argue that mentality is sorely lacking in the health care industry.”