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

1 comments :

  1. As a physician and founder of PassportMD, Inc. (http://www.PassportMD.com ) , I remain committed to creating a free site and service so that people of any age and any economic status can participate. The free service helps people through the often-tedious process of creating a very valuable, and potentially life saving tool, the personal health record. We are committed to simplifying this process, giving people, seniors, adults, children, particularly with a history of at least one chronic medical disease, on multiple medications, or with a history of allergies. Doctors need to have access to reliable information that is legible and accessible and PassportMD provides this needed function.
    Medical Mistakes are common, hospital errors are responsible for over 100,000 deaths per year and these could be preventable. Information about drug interactions and cross reactivity combined with allergy alerts lead the way in being critical to every healthcare provider before initiating care. At PassportMD.com we have created a very easy way to solicit this information from individuals and host it so that they may access it or print it off in times of need at no charge and as often as they would like.

    Scenarios where this type of service makes the most sense is baby boomers that are responsible for managing their elderly parents’ medical care and doctors’ visits, or seniors that live alone or are responsible for managing their own care and visits to their doctors. Or, “snowbirds” that share many doctors between more than one state would benefit from PassportMD.com. Alternatively, children, before they go to summer camp, if they have an allergy or take chronic medications for chronic problems. Anyone with any chronic disease, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, for example would benefit from the free PassportMD.com service. Additionally, active, healthy individuals that are pro-active with their health in preparation for unexpected and unpredictable medical problems would benefit from PassportMD.com. People that travel frequently, cruise to the islands, or boat, would be especially susceptible to medical emergencies without their accurate medical history.
    The doctors are very slowly adopting electronic health records. This adoption is way too slow and is very complicated. It has many factors in play as it relates to the economics of medicine. Although privacy is considered an issue, the true issue is cost, implementation and maintanence costs to the physician practice are too burdensome in light of decreasing reimbursement. Thus, only 7.5 % of physician practices are currently adopting electronic health records. Though, if you poll the remaining 92.5% of physicians, probably all would agree that electronic health records are better for medicine and for the patient. Adoption is inevitable but the pace and time period for adoption is dependent upon many factors. You, the patient, and you, the consumer, should not have to wait for these forces to work themselves out. You can be proactive and you can start your own personal health record at no charge with PassportMD.com.

    ReplyDelete

 
Top
Google Analytics Alternative