Sometime in late 2004, I started taking note of this interesting, little (but growing) enterprise out of Massachusetts called athenahealth. I became interested in the company, with its lack of capitalization and spacing, after it got (what I believe was) its first mention on HIStalk. Naturally, Tim couldn’t pass up the opportunity to [...]
Fifteen years ago, America had a long discussion about how to implement universal healthcare coverage. The proposal developed by Hillary Clinton, dubbed Hillarycare by its critics, certainly had its weaknesses, but the nuclear weapon that annihilated not only her proposal, but the entire discussion itself — and ensured the topic wouldn’t come up again [...]
Call it HealthConnect, Take Two. Only this time, replace Kaiser Permanente with Sutter Health.
Tim, over at HIStalk, was the first to pick up a story by Chris Rauber covering Sutter’s Epic Systems implementation. The guy in charge over at Sutter, Jerry Padavano, wants to be clear: “I’ve learned from Kaiser’s missteps, and we’re [...]
I posted last week that membership growth at Kaiser Permanente has crumbled for the past three quarters, down 75% so far this year, a seemingly significant fact that was buried six paragraphs down in the quarterly press release. The news only gets worse from there, sadly. While potential new members are staying far, [...]
A year ago this week, Kaiser Permanente was called to task for its practice of rescission, the retroactive termination of health insurance coverage. In many cases, coincidentally, Kaiser Permanente and other insurers will initiate a rescission investigation when someone has just been diagnosed with a serious illness, perhaps a serious and expensive illness.
Now that [...]
Update: MoveOn.org is helping organize events across the country to urge Congress to override President Bush’s “reckless veto.”
The gist: President Bush has vetoed an important bill that would have helped expand insurance coverage for uninsured children. The only hope now is for fifteen additional Republicans to vote to support the bill in the House, [...]
Michael Moore is ruffling more than a few feathers with SiCKO, his new movie which shines a (camera) spotlight on what’s wrong with healthcare in America. The movie doesn’t even open until Friday, but guess which healthcare organization already has its press release ready to go, saying its “portrayal” in SiCKO “must be addressed.” [...]
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, [...]
The New York Times is wondering out loud whether the electronic health “cost savings” emperor has an empty wardrobe:
Saving money can be expensive.
Indeed, the quest to save dollars in the nation’s $2.1 trillion annual health care bill is becoming a lucrative market of its own. Thousands of companies, large and small, are pitching cost-saving ideas [...]
Kenneth Kizer, chairman and chief executive at Medsphere, resigned last week.
In the manual of public relations tricks, I guess issuing a troubling press release on a Friday must have been deprecated in favor of not issuing one at all.
Tim posted word of the resignation at 6:25 Friday morning, while Modern Healthcare got around to it [...]