blog.fixkp.org

Since November 3, I have received thousands of messages from my colleagues across Kaiser Permanente, as well as hundreds from other concerned individuals. Your messages of support have meant more to me than you can imagine. Those of you who offered helpful information, thank you. Many of you have asked important questions, and I apologize that I cannot respond to each message individually. However, I will try, here, to answer the most common questions, to the best of my ability.

HealthConnect questions

Do you believe HealthConnect is a mistake?

I believe that Kaiser Permanente must have a sustainable, workable plan for implementing electronic health records. Unfortunately, outages of our current HealthConnect systems have increased from 9,188 user hours of downtime in June 2006 to 59,142 hours by the end of October 2006, a 543% surge. (For comparison, the average concurrent user count has only increased 25%, from 8,741 to 10,954.)

The level of downtime we are seeing is unacceptable for a mission critical environment like healthcare, regardless of the cause of those outages. Our physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and receptionists need to have systems supporting them that function reliably, so that they can provide the care our members deserve. HealthConnect is a necessary mission for our organization, but we must be open and honest with ourselves and our vendors about the issues we are facing, so that we can begin work on fixing these problems.

Is this downtime the fault of Epic or Citrix?

The issues we are seeing with HealthConnect are the result of an ongoing and worsening series of failures encompassing all aspects of the Kaiser Permanente information technology infrastructure, including the infrastructure that has been put into place specifically to support HealthConnect. No single vendor can be responsible for the entirety of the downtime we are experiencing.

What do you believe will be the next steps for the HealthConnect project?

In his response to these concerns, George Halvorson stated his belief that “time” will allow the HealthConnect project to function reliably and properly and “prove the point beyond debate.” Unfortunately, neither our physicians, nurses, nor our members, have the luxury of time when critical care could depend on HealthConnect functioning properly. The 543% increase in downtime since June is unacceptable.

We must begin working with Epic, Citrix, and our other vendors in a frank and transparent manner, and fully understand how we can overcome these issues before we move forward with any further deployments of HealthConnect. In the interim, we cannot depend on HealthConnect in any potentially critical situation. We must stop marketing HealthConnect and start properly engineering it.

General questions

What is your position with Kaiser Permanente?

My employee badge reads “Projects Manager, Education and Training,” although that title provides little description of my actual responsibilities. My department, (Employee) Education and Training is affiliated with the (Member) Health Education department, and a portion of my responsibilities involve developing curriculum and publications for both employee development and training, as well as member health education. I am not directly involved in the clerical tracking of employee training program completion, although I do oversee the information technology operations supporting those regulatory responsibilities and staff.

What is your involvement with HealthConnect?

I do not work on the project directly. Within the employee training programs area of my responsibilities, I have developed training materials and assisted in the development of the training curriculum supporting the project. From an information technology standpoint, I have worked on projects to modernize several member information systems, and I have worked on developing the interfaces between those systems and HealthConnect systems.

Why did you alert your colleagues to these issues?

The financial difficulty Kaiser Permanente faces over at least the next two years was the primary reason I made the decision to share this information with my colleagues. HealthConnect, and our other information technology projects, can still be accomplished, but we must eliminate financial waste related to these projects, without reducing our workforce and without reducing the scope of these projects.

It is clear to me that we cannot eliminate clinical and support staff in an attempt to try to compensate for these problems. Reducing our workforce is not necessary, and it does not live up to the values that Kaiser Permanente stands for. Recognizing the impact this inefficiency is having on our organization, and understanding the growing impact it will have, made it clear to me that I had to share the information I had gathered.

What do you believe Kaiser Permanente must do going forward?

Honesty and transparency are necessary for a not-for-profit organization as important as Kaiser Permanente. The issues we have faced, especially this year, make it clear that each of us at Kaiser Permanente must recommit ourselves to protecting our organization. We have much work to do, and we can only accomplish this if every stakeholder within Kaiser Permanente takes responsibility to care for our resources and defend our heritage and our mission, and to fight for our future.

I encourage you to visit FixKP.org to learn more. Sincerely, and most respectfully,

Justen Deal

learn more  listen now  subscribe now

This story was originally posted at justendeal.com.