Wal-Mart & The Future Of Health Care

From in-store health care clinics to eyeglasses, from flu shots to urgent care, Wal-Mart has its designs on leveraging its 3700 stores into the largest force in American healthcare. How does this affect you and your industry? 

Will Wal-Mart become the largest referral source in medicine through their in-store clinics? Will Wal-Mart “Mom and Pop” certain specialties into economic hardship? How will Wal-Mart’s plans for a “Healthcare Data Card” affect physician providers? 

Ron’s one-hour presentation “Wal-Mart & The Future of Healthcare” addresses these questions and more, and is food for thought for you face a new competitive force on the horizon.

Rebooting Healthcare

Rebooting Healthcare is directed by Ron Galloway, the director of the provocative documentary Why Wal-Mart Works, a film which made news worldwide and had its premiere inside the U.S. Capitol Building.

Rebooting Healthcare examines these issues through in-depth conversations with the leading thinkers and prime movers involved in the healthcare field. Through a structured series of questions the film offers what amounts to a macro comparative study of the thoughts of the most influential people in healthcare,  the very people whose opinions and policies will shape the decisions that will influence the lives of all U.S. citizens.

Rather than pushing a particular point of view, the film will let the viewer draw his or her own conclusions based upon the data presented. The goal of the film is to present as much data as possible within the feature documentary structure. The film has no sponsors and is internally financed.

Trends In Electronic Medical Records

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) is one of the areas of most intense interest in healthcare this year, due in large part to attention paid to it by the new administration. Nearly $19 billion in tax inventives are being directed to EMR adoption by hospitals and physicians.

In this presentation, Ron takes a look at 3 trends that are converging to dramatically affect this area of intense interest. First is the emergence of open source standards (OSS) in EMR software. Companies such as Microsoft and other software vendors are pushing proprietary formats for records, the analogy being the “.doc” standard in word processing. Open source advocates, including Google, are pushing for a single open standard for EMR files. Billions of dollars are at stake. Who has the advantage? Will the VA’s Vista format prevail?

The second major trend in EMR is the reconciliation of privacy standards as regards the individual records themselves. How does HIPAA apply? How do individual state regulations inhibit or help the adoption of EMR? Who owns the records themselves? Are they the intellectual property of the hospital, physician, or patient? As Personal Health Records (PHR), as inplemented by Google and Dossia, increase in popularity will there be a conflict between PHR’s and EMR’s?

Finally, Ron will examine the role of semantics, or “tagging” of information contained in the records, and the huge part this overlooked component of EMR 2.0 will play in the coherence of EMRs, and the reason why tagging may ultimately be the driving factor in the growth of the EMR industry.

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