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 [...]
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 [...]
The much bigger story today is that George Halvorson is once again proving that he has destroyed accountability at Kaiser Permanente: instead of paying a $25,000 fine for an egregious medication error that led to the death of a baby, he’s ignoring the fine. Read the story over at Kaiser Thrive. I’ll have [...]
Nary a mention of it’s been made in the California media, but Francis J. Crosson (you can call him Jay) is resigning as head of The Permanente Federation, effective September 30. Jack Cochran, a plastic surgeon who currently heads up the Permanente Medical Group in Colorado, will be “elevated to [the] national role” of [...]
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 [...]
With governance at Kaiser Permanente in shambles, it is sad but not surprising to hear that the respected musical chair method of reorganization is now in full swing at KP-IT, under Phil Fasano. The new orgchart has been drawn up and distributed. The only trouble? Well, there aren’t any names. Simple [...]
Kaiser Permanente reported its first quarter financial results late Friday. You’d be hard-pressed to find any actual coverage of the results, but if any newspaper cared enough to cover the financial health of the largest not-for-profit healthcare provider in the country, it would go something like…
Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, the largest not-for-profit [...]
If Kaiser Permanente was a for-profit, publicly traded company, it would come in at number 63, by revenue, on the 2007 Fortune 500 listing, just ahead of The Walt Disney Company.
In fact, as a not-for-profit organization, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals raked in considerably more profit (on a net income basis) last [...]
Today, the Charleston Gazette is printing, on their front page, a story based on an interview I did with Tara Tuckwiller, along with a reprint of Rhonda Rundle’s Wall Street Journal article. From the Gazette article:
In a telephone interview with the Gazette Wednesday from his home in Los Angeles, Deal said he still thinks [...]