Ingram Micro Prepares Health-Care Solution For VARs

Plans for the health-care initiative are nearly finalized, and Ingram Micro is only waiting to sign a formal contract with the electronic medical record software vendor before making the formal announcement, said Bob Laclede, vice president of business development for the distributor.

Ingram Micro's initial electronic medical record (EMR) solution is aimed at helping medical organizations with between one and 100 physicians eliminate paper files, automate their records systems, and keep track of epidemics such as the Swine flu, Laclede said.

"A lot of VARs play with physicians' infrastructures, such as helping doctors with tablet PCs or document management," he said. "But they seldom work with solutions such as EMR or electronic prescriptions. We're enabling them to provide the entire solution and install and manage it."

The health-care solution will be able to be deployed either on a server in a doctor's office, on some cloud-based infrastructure, or as a managed service on Ingram Micro's Seismic platform, Laclede said.

It will include software to handle electronic medical records, electronic prescriptions, and the customer's medical practice, Laclede said. Options will depend on the medical office's specific focus, such as the ability to connect to a heart monitor machine and treadmill for a cardiatric practice, he said.

Ingram Micro will offer its health-care solution to its Venture Tech Network (VTN) community of solution providers before it rolls it out to its entire solution provider base, Laclede said.

The health-care solution follows Ingram Micro's offering of other economic stimulus-related solutions in the education, broadband, and infrastructure categories, Laclede said. The distributor will likely branch into the public safety first responder market next, he said.