On Sunday, Joe Quinn (Senior Director for State Healthcare Policy at Wal-Mart) gave a keynote address on "How Wal-Mart is Reforming Healthcare". Mr. Quinn's presentation focused on healthcare benefits for their employees, along with efforts such as retail clinics and lower prescription drug costs.
As a group practice administrator, I am both intrigued and concerned to hear about Wal-Mart dipping its toe into my industry. I asked around afterwards to find out what other people thought of the speech, and the replies were all over the board. Some people loved it, other people hated it, but more than anything else, Mr. Quinn made us all think.
When I think of Wal-Mart, I think of a company that excels at wringing out efficiencies in their supply chain and their workflow processes, and this is what they bring to the table in healthcare. My personal opinion is that this is why they were able to score such an easy "win" in the area of prescription drug costs (an area filled with inefficiencies and middlemen). Retail clinics have been more of a challenge, but if Wal-Mart is successful in lobbying for political reform, who knows what they could do in this area.
What do you think? Are we all destined to wear blue vests with little smiley faces on them? Will high-quality, integrated health care delivery systems succeed in fending off the Wal-Marts? And in the midst of all this change, can independent physician groups survive and thrive in an integrated system?
-Greg