War-gaming analyst picks the drug distributor over Microsoft, Allscripts and other EMR players

Now in its fifth year as organized by Fuld & Co. (Cambridge MA), a type of competitive analysis known as war-gaming identified McKesson as a potential winner when the business environment for EMRs becomes established. Fuld & Co. sets up teams from leading business schools (this year, MIT [Sloan], UPenn [Wharton], Columbia, and Northwestern [Kellogg]), each representing one candidate EMR player: Microsoft, McKesson, Kaiser-Permanente and Allscripts. Fuld & Co. scripts likely scenarios and—in real time—the b-school students develop strategies and make presentations to a board of judges, who choose the ultimate winner.

“McKesson will work to vastly expand its healthcare IT niche through its dominance in logistics and understanding of the health value chain, data creation and data utility—with an emphasis on physician, payor and healthcare delivery applications” concluded the Fuld report of the exercise.

“Clearly, EMR is in its infancy,” says Leon Fuld, president, “but the eventual impact of the technology on the bipharma industry is broad and inevitable. Players in the healthcare arena will gain total transparency on issues like evidence-based medicine and comparative effectiveness. This will impact both drugs on the market and clinical research.”
And the fact that the No. 1 drug wholesaler could become the No. 1 EMR system vendor generates many potential implications of its own.