A few posts back, I noted that Wal*Mart was participating in a healthcare-oriented entity called Dossia, whose mission it was to help deliver healthcare services faster and cheaper to the masses. It would accomplish this through the Holy Grail of electronic records, integration, etc.
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT! Sorry, please try again.
Word comes today that Wal*Mart and its other Dossia cohorts - which include Intel, Pitney-Bowes, Applied Materials, BP and Cardinal Health - are suing its primary technology provider (Omnimedix Institute) for failure to do much of anything save create a prototype of the system. The two parties are now busy accusing each other of poor management, confusion, lack of delivery, etc.
OK, I applaud the effort to make obtaining services, maintaining records and (unfortunately) paying bills easier, but a consortium with members such as those listed above has long odds to succeed unless employees are dedicated to the effort, funds put in and managed, and roles and repsonsibilities (and milestones) are plainsly spelled out and tracked. ANY consortium of numerous players, particulary those from different backgrounds, is challenged to produce anything whether its providers screw up or not. While Omnimedix may well be at fault for not producing anything substantial despite the quarterly payments of $1.25M it was beginning to receive, one has to suspect that the road to blame runs on a two-way street.
I also suspect that if Dossia had taken its $15M (that it intended to pay Omnimedix), handed it to say, Accenture or IBM Global Services or someone, and said "create me a federated database for employee health records and make it work in, oh, 12 months" and then gotten out of the way, I daresay we might have seen some results, especially given the pedigree of the Dossia participants.
No comments:
Post a Comment