Marie-Anne Hogarth, with the East Bay Business Times, has what I believe is the first interview with Phil Fasano since he joined Kaiser Permanente back in February. In the first dose of honesty in a while, Fasano admits KP is falling far short on reliability when it comes to HealthConnect:
The first goal, Fasano says, is to get KP HealthConnect up and running at least “five nines” - 99.999 percent of the time.
“(Kaiser CEO) George Halvorson and I have come together on that and believe very, very passionately that has got to be our goal,” Fasano said.
That’s a different message from what [former KP CIO and HealthConnect architect, Bruce] Turkstra related to East Bay Business Times in an interview in December, when he said the goal was an up-time of 99.7 percent. That would mean the system would be down about four minutes a day.
In the first quarter of 2007 - according to Fasano - the system has been up 99.57 percent of the time.
Thinking about this step by step, now… Four of Kaiser Permanente’s 37 hospitals depend on HealthConnect. And that system is currently down for several hours every month. In case you were wondering, those four hospitals are South Sacramento and Baldwin Park (since last fall) and West Los Angeles and Santa Rosa (since earlier this month). Some might suggest you avoid those four facilities especially if unless you have a critical emergency.
Despite the alarmingly high downtime HealthConnect is still experiencing, Fasano is setting his sights on more glittery concepts (sure to tie in with the for-profit KP subsidiary, Aviva Health):
In particular, Fasano said that in the next 12, 24 or 36 months, Kaiser will be coming out with a suite of products allowing doctors to follow patients more closely. Patients in their homes could step on a scale - for instance - and their weight would be automatically uploaded electronically onto their electronic charts for doctor to see.
“Every bit of information that we expect to gather, we expect members to have access to what is appropriate for them,” Fasano said. “And do that in any format that they will like.”
Translation: Well, we might not be able to pull up your medical information in a critical emergency, since the system could very well be down, but whenever HealthConnect is back up, we’ll at least know how much you weighed yesterday! And that’ll be in…12…24…or…maybe 36 months? Something like that, right? Yeah. Sometime. Soon. Then we’ll fix HealthConnect.
Lastly, the article says that Carol Rizzo, who specializes in “establishing offshore business processing operations and IT development,” has (apparently) replaced poor David Watson as chief technology officer. Indeed, Ms. Rizzo, like Mr. Fasano, has a nifty LinkedIn profile. Like Fasano, she also has held a bunch of quick jobs over the past few years, and she also comes from the financial sector.
Is there anybody out there who can actually fix KP-IT, instead of harp on about Internet-enabled toothbrushes weight scales? Or, for that matter, is there a woman or man out there who can fix KP? (We could start with an actually accountable board of directors, and then a honest decent chief executive officer would be great.)
Preferably we’re looking for somebody who knows at least something about healthcare…
Reorganization: musical chairs. Hiring: recruit from LinkedIn. I thought things were bad last November. I had no idea. I just had no idea.
(Full disclosure: I have nothing against LinkedIn or musical chairs.)
