Comments on: Wal-Mart + eClinicalWorks Electronic Medical Records | An Odd Couple with Good Intentions

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:17:00 +0000

Linux is contemporary technology which, like Windows, has a long history. MySQL is owned by Oracle which is a market leader in database technologies.

By: Warren Chan

Warren Chan — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:33:35 +0000

We are currently using eClinicalWorks medical Records Systems as the front-end patient registration system to interface with Meditech information Technology back-end system. There are alot of hidden costs that are not revealed during the initial sales consultation process. We are running the application on MS Server 2008 with SQL Database. The implementation and installation team was very inexperienced and we felt like we were a beta site. The contract was very loosely defined and hardware requirements kept changing as things progressed until the cost of hardware tripled in price. eClinicalWorks was never able to provide a clear design plan and could not provide us with any references. They were only interested in making their software look good and required us to buy top-of-the-line equipment for everything. Quite often, it was not clear who was the “customer”. They proclaimed to be experienced in implementing their product with Meditech, but seemed clueless when working with Meditech Engineers when creating the interface. From my experience thus far, they have a very very poor customer service record and will recite corporate policy if you challenge the timeliness of problem resolution. We currently have a server license update problem that has been pending since June 28, 2010. Today is July 14, 2010. Their contract requires a one hour response time to server issues and they fulfilled their obligation when they called us back. We have two brand new servers that they recommended that we buy for redundancy/high availability and performance which has been sitting idle waiting for them to setup now for weeks. Apparently the original project manager, who was incompetant has been replaced with someone who is even worse. I strongly caution anyone interested in this product to do your homework and ask for references and don’t expect too much from their technical support staff.

By: Clark Campbell

Clark Campbell — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:40:58 +0000

Walmart is profit oriented. When it is to their advantage to make more profit, sometimes people, business and organizations are left in the dust, holding the bag or with their pants down, or bankrupt like small vendors that that are abruptly dropped, or worse, large vendors that are abruptly dropped. Hopefully this will just be a comissioned role that Walmart plays with eCW blackmailed into providing proper customer support at the risk of loosing their reputation. This could be quite possible after having to service a product priced too low or service requirements way beyong their capabilities.

By: Wesley Rishel

Wesley Rishel — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:27:23 +0000

As I noted in my blog “To Halamka on Sam’s Club eCW” I have a somewhat different take on this, although leads to a similar conclusion. Although Sam’s Club is owned by Wal-Mart it is a different operation, closer to Costco. Sam’s Club has a specific marketing channel reaching out to small businesses and through that channel is already supplying many of the needs of physicians practices. So, the model of initial customer approach is not of the kindly old retired guy at the door of Wal-Mart but rather the inside salesperson who has an ongoing client relationship with the office manager.
As Halamka described it in his blog, “Electronic Health Records from Wal-mart” the handoff to eCW sales occurred shortly after first contact. In this model, eCW has achieved what all EMR vendors are trying to find, a sales channel to small doctor’s offices.
My concern is that the economics of the deal give short shrift to implementation support. This is described in detail in my blog entry

By: Jeffery Daigrepont

Jeffery Daigrepont — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:23:13 +0000

How the mega-merchandiser will deal with the nuances of various medical specialties is unclear. Go to my Thoughts on Wal-Mart and EMR at http://blog.cokergroup.com.

By: Kay Stanley

Kay Stanley — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:28:51 +0000

Can EMR Success come in a box off the shelf of a mega-merchandiser? Not without considering the many other factors that are encompassed in a successful conversion. Whatever product and vendor a practice selects requires much more than a simple purchase at a discount price. A complete response is available at http://blog.cokergroup.com/?p=824

By: Zach Evans

Zach Evans — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:02:32 +0000

I agree that, while the Walmart/eCW partnership will provide plenty of buzz (for a while), it will not have a huge amount of upside for Sam’s Club. I do, however, see a bit more downside risk for eCW.

Walmart and Sam’s Club are famous for turning products and categories in to commodities that can be purchased cheaply and, in the case of Sam’s Club, in bulk. EMR software – from any vendor – is not a commodity. As stated above, it is almost never used straight out of the box (like other software sold at Sam’s Club, such as QuickBooks) but almost always needs some level of customization or integration.

That being said, perhaps eCW has structured their partnership with Walmart to be more of a lead-generation pact rather than a direct sale channel. If this is the case I could certainly see the relationship bearing fruit over the long-term.

By: Gerald McIntyre

Gerald McIntyre — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:13:57 +0000

The product is a comprehensive system built on solid technology… OK Solid yes but not necessarily the best choice.

~ The eCW program is built on two open source technologies – a database management system called MySQL and the Linux operating system for the server. This may seem appealing to the uneducated buyer because there are freeware versions of these products which makes the initial system purchase much cheaper.
~ eCW promotes themselves as Microsoft compatible, but this is client side only.
~ Linux is a form of Unix, which is generally considered to be old technology.