Interesting article with WalMart executive vice president of risk management and former CIO. In this interview many topics are covered including their involvement in Dossia, the personal health record program initiated by several large employers. Walmart as well as Intel are the founding members of the initiative. She also discusses the involvement of the retail clinics in the full scenario. BD
http://www.workforceonline.com/section/09/feature/24/81/12/index.html
As CIO, Dillman led Wal-Mart’s embrace of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, which use wireless bar-code technology to track products from factories in China to store shelves around the globe. Now, the use of RFID is standard in the industry—and just about everywhere else.
WM: How soon after talking to Intel chairman Craig Barrett did you give the OK to join Dossia?
Dillman: We knew we were interested. You go through an initial interest level, which was actually pretty quick. And then work through all the logistics. So it was probably three or four months.
WM: What does Wal-Mart bring to Dossia?
Dillman: We’ve got a pretty good track record for being able to use technology. We’ve built large data warehouses. We’ve deployed to a large number of people, specifically. Our associate base uses a lot of technology every day, so we kind of know how to do that.
Dillman: Dossia is meant to be the framework that personal health records, that are customer-facing, and electronic health records, that are provider-facing—they all can connect to this framework. Dossia is not trying to create the software that others are going to go use. But whatever anybody creates will have the ability to connect to this to get all the information. Having said that, all of our [health] clinic providers have their own information systems that they use to manage their clinics. Most are already using electronic health records. Of course, we’d like for their system to connect to Dossia so when [customers] come in they can have an entire record.
More information on Dossia here:
http://www.dossia.org/index.html
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Wal-Marts Linda Dillman Talks About Changing the Health Care System
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