We’ve received many, many emails and submissions from Wal-Mart employees over the past few years. And even more have gone to our Wal-Mart Speak Out site to share their stories. It’s much more infrequent that we come across an industry professional that deals with Wal-Mart employees on a regular basis, but in today’s Baltimore Sun that’s exactly what we found. It’s a letter from a doctor, and we’ll let it stand on its own merits.

Wal-Mart is an image conscious opportunist. I have several Wal-Mart employees as my patients. I can in all honesty declare that Wal-Mart, a wealthy corporation, for years got away with providing its employees no health care coverage at all or the type of coverage from which doctors could barely eke out payments.

Out of pocket expenses for patients are outrageous with this coverage. Hand me a Wal-Mart health insurance card, and I will let out a spontaneous sigh of exasperation because I know from experience what lies ahead is a runaround for meager compensation after I have delivered all the services.

You say Wal-Mart has obtained religion and is behind Obama’s health plan? Will there be a richer bounty on my plate now for tending to my overworked and underpaid Wal-Mart flock tenderly? Somehow I doubt my sighs of exasperation will cease with this new miracle under way in the health care sector.

A fed up doc

Wal-Mart stingy with health benefits [Baltimore Sun]

According to the NY Times, “Wal-Mart is striding into the market for electronic health records, seeking to bring the technology into the mainstream for physicians in small offices, where most of America’s doctors practice medicine.”

Based on this Wall Street Journal story from 2006, Wal-Mart has been poking its nose into this issue for a while now. With the Obama White House trying to jump-start the adoption of digital medical records by including $19 billion of incentives in the economic stimulus package, Wal-Mart is jumping back in.

The company plans to team its Sam’s Club division with Dell for computers and eClinicalWorks, a fast-growing private company, for software. Wal-Mart says its package deal of hardware, software, installation, maintenance and training will make the technology more accessible and affordable, undercutting rival health information technology suppliers by as much as half.

There are some, especially those physicians working in smaller offices, that doubt the wisdom of switching to electronic health records because of the cost and complexity involved. The New England Journal of Medicine has noted that only 17% of physicians are using computerized patient records currently.

Wal-Mart Plans to Market Digital Health Records System [New York Times]

Read the rest of this story ...