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The East Bay Business Times recently ran an interesting article, by Marie-Anne Hogarth, on the first forays into “social media” by Kaiser Permanente. The article quotes Dmitriy Kruglyak, (link via Google) who heads up Trusted.MD, and who is moderating a discussion at the upcoming Consumer Health World conference, “Open Healthcare: Learning to Live in the Brave New World.”

As the moderator of the panel, Dmitriy, understandably, tells the Business Times that he wanted to provide an “open, fair forum” for each of the panelists participating in the discussion. The article mentions that officials at KP, after considering an invitation to join the discussion, declined to make anyone available for the panel. The Business Times was, nevertheless, excited about the opportunity: “It would have been a debate that many would have paid to see: Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson on the same panel as Justen Deal, the IT employee who was placed on administrative leave after sending a mass e-mail detailing his concerns about the company’s emergency medical records system.“

Unfortunately, I will not be able to join the discussion at the conference. However, the panel assembled represents a very experienced, very diverse spectrum of folks from across healthcare. I hope to be there to hear what, I imagine, will be an interesting, open, and informative discussion.

In fact, the conversation leading up to the actual discussion itself, is turning out to be a good one, as well. Dmitriy posted yesterday a very honest critique of how Kaiser Permanente has tried to “handle” the HealthConnect concerns: “Control of the message is so 20th century. The name of the 21st century game is trust. The only way to earn it is through openness.“

Prior to my November 3 message, Cliff Dodd had embarked on an effort to promote “transparency” in KP-IT’s successes (and failures). One particular move under that initiative was to make HealthConnect system reliability information widely available to clinicians, managers, and engineers. The statistics were startlingly negative, and, unfortunately, they were an accurate reflection of the health of the HealthConnect system: it was failing. Within a week or so of Cliff Dodd abruptly leaving on November 6, the so-called “commitment to transparency” followed him out the door.

Since mid-November, HealthConnect system reliability and availability reports have become highly restricted. In a meeting I had with Dr. Jeffrey Weisz and Thomas Williamson just before Thanksgiving, they both indicated even their access to the reports had been restricted. Dr. Weisz is the medical director for Southern California, and he is responsible for making decisions that affect the care of millions of our members. He told me that he had previously made the decision to slow further HealthConnect inpatient deployments in Southern California (beyond Baldwin Park). Now even he no longer has direct access to the reports that should be a critical factor in his decision making.

The truth is that severely limiting access to accurate information, inside and outside the organization, has not, and will not fix HealthConnect or its problems. The final reports that were made available indicated uptime had continued to severely deteriorate, month-over-month, well into November. The patient safety issues are serious, they do exist, and they must be addressed. Dmitriy pointed out the importance of “openness,” but, in this case, it’s not just important. Kaiser Permanente members are depending on an open, honest process to fix HealthConnect. That process is important, and it’s essential.

Update: A kind soul was kind enough to point out to me that there actually is a vision and set of principles for the “business” of healthcare in today’s world. Important folks from the Stanford University School of Medicine and Evanston Northwestern Healthcare have signed on, to name just two. Take a look.