The pharmacy business is becoming more homogenous by the week.
Fresh off the news that its parent company would acquire Rite Aid for at least $9.4 billion, Walgreens announced Thursday that it would install Epic Systems electronic health records in all of its Walgreens Healthcare Clinic convenience clinics. That’s the same EHR that primary competitor CVS Health has in its MinuteClinic locations.
The decision, according to Walgreens, is meant to support Healthcare Clinic expansion plans and to improve care coordination. Walgreens, like CVS, is working on repositioning itself as a vital cog in the healthcare system, and the retail clinics fall somewhere between primary care physicians and emergency rooms.
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Starting early next year, the EpicCare EHR will replace a proprietary system now in place at the more than 400 Healthcare Clinic locations as Deerfield, Illinois-based Walgreens plays catch-up to CVS. The latter operates about 1,000 walk-in clinics, and plans on having 1,500 by 2017.
“This state-of-the-industry EHR will enable more seamless communication with health systems and local providers, and gives us enhanced capabilities to deliver better health outcomes through greater care coordination and interoperability,” Dr. Patrick Carroll, Walgreens’ chief medical officer for Healthcare Clinics, said in a statement.
Walgreens said that it will join the Care Everywhere interoperability network among hundreds of Epic customers.
Epic, of Verona, Wisconsin, has taken a lot of heat for supposedly hindering interoperablity with providers that use competing EHRs. Still, the company talks up its efforts in this arena. “With our shared focus on interoperability, Walgreens will also become a part of the nation’s largest network of care organizations securely sharing patient information with hospitals, laboratories, private practices, federal agencies, local care providers and state HIEs,” Epic President Carl Dvorak said in the Walgreens press release.
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The fact that Dvorak offered a statement is remarkable because Epic as a rule does not issue its own press releases.
Photo: Flickr user Mike Mozart
