Billions of dollars and millions of lives are serious business, but sometimes I wish, if for a moment, that I could laugh at the nightmare that is HealthConnect. Here’s an attempt (followed by the serious part)…
Oakland, California, December 17, 2007. Kaiser Permanente today sought federal disaster assistance for its HealthConnect electronic medical record project. Declaring a state of emergency covering all eight regions impacted by the project’s deployment, each of the regional Permanente medical directors called on the Department of Health and Human Services for help with the ongoing fallout from the ongoing rollout (casualties which include staff morale, patient waiting times, physician burnout, pharmacy overload, nurse exhaustion, and member dues swindling). Embattled and unshaven chairman George Halvorson, via satellite linkup from a rural village in Africa where he is working on his nineteenth book, continued to defend the years-late and billions-over budget project, claiming the system to be “robust” and the deployment to be “on track.”
That was enjoyable, but there is an actual story hiding behind that parody…
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