| November 11th, 2005 |
The wondering about how Kaiser would try to drown out the information about the death count is over! Kaiser is hiring consultants to spam the Internet! I invite you to follow the trail:
Kaiser has hired Digital Impact, a specialist in Search Engine Optimization. This may not be the only consultant Kaiser has hired in their quest to manipulate the Internet.
Recently many blogging systems have been spammed with Kaiser links.
Blog spewing out KP Press Releases, supposedly because reporters want to add Kaiser PR automatically to their newsfeeds: http://kpreleases.blogs.com/my_weblog/
Here's an example from eBlogger: http://kaisernm7.blogspot.com/
This one associates Kaiser with Bariatric Surgery: http://www.gastric-bypass-surgery-picture.com/weight-loss/125
Here's an example from LiveJournal where a number of companies benefit, including Kaiser: http://www.livejournal.com/users/insurancea/
Update: LiveJournal just shut down a similar spam blog under the account "medir". I've saved a couple of the cached pages.
The point of spamming the blogs is just to get as many links as possible to keep Kaiser at the top of the search engines, so Kaiser's key messages will be the first thing people see. The articles are randomly chosen by a harvesting program, without regard for content.
If a company uses fake links in order to look more popular and make their message louder, does this constitute false advertising?
Update: Laura Marshall, Senior Consultant for Kaiser Permanente National Communication revealed in June that Kaiser was interested in a blogging strategy. (and here's Laura's blog - and she apparently has at least two others.)
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If Kaiser wants to address their staggering medical error rate, then CEO George Halvorson needs to take strong action to stop the reign of terror against employees who try to bring up problems. Recent cases of retaliation and wrongful termination include Maria Lungu, Dr. Cyrus Safai, Margaret McIlroy, Dr. Thomas Jensen, Stacie Wong, Tim Coe, Stephan Pardi, this anonymous Kaiser pathologist, Robert Baker, and Karen Daily (if anyone has a link with details of the Daily case, please let me know). These are only the high profile cases I could easily find on the Internet. They don't include cases that didn't make the news or cases that were quietly settled. I also found a number of cases the Kaiser lawyers got quashed, such as O'Keefe, Carr, and Villanueva. At the Dept. of Fair Employment and Housing, a caseworker told me that her agency gets a lot of Kaiser retaliation complaints, and DFEH only has the resources to follow up on a fraction of them. Of course, I can personally vouch for Kaiser supporting the use of false documentation while destroying actual evidence to cover up illegal activities.
Kaiser is currently refusing to comment on how many deaths have not yet been reported, maintaining their default attitude that nothing counts unless they get caught. One indicator of the scope for error might be the Kaiser memo that confessed 20,000 employees are injured every year. Perhaps this number would be lower if Kaiser employees hadn't been shown by many precedents that they would be harassed and fired if they rocked the boat.
In other news, The McLaughlin Group is now doing infomercials for Kaiser's EMR system. I just saw a panel show with Dr. Yancy Phillips, a Kaiser COO, and Dr. David Brailer, National Health Information Technology Tsar. Kaiser of course bought off Brailer a couple of months ago by throwing a conference on his behalf and wining and dining him around Oakland. If anyone else saw this, I'd like to point out Dr. Phillips told a straight out lie when he said names are never associated with with data analysis. The data spill that I found contained 140+ names, associated with their Medical Record Numbers.
I also thought it was interesting that Dr. Brailer characterized his job as defending the President's proposals, not advocating for a position based on agency research. Brailer didn't bring much more than soundbytes to the discussion, and he was left flailing when the interviewer brought up the nightmare scenario of an anti-abortion activist using the EMR system to gather names of women who have had abortions while on the job at Kaiser. But why speculate on nightmare scenario's when Kaiser patient privacy gets compromised by something as simple as Google Desktop.
Edited to add: Here's a hint about how Kaiser gets all their Washington gigs - http://www.bainpr.com/cs_kp.html
I'm gradually collecting the street opinion about Kaiser from all over LiveJournal. See the public speak here.
Edited to add: Being addicted to re-organizing stuff, I've now broken down this public opinion into categories.
On an amusing note, I discovered that Dr. Steve LeVine has his own blog. When I last saw Dr. LeVine, he was thanking me for trying to advocate for recognition of his staff, a couple of weeks before my own experience with Kaiser terror tactics. I wonder if he at least had a momentary shiver about how Kaiser left no good deed unpunished.
Update: In regard to Dr. Death Patel, it turns out Kaiser avoided reporting malpractice in Oregon. Commentary on Kaiser's "weasly moves" here.
Another Update: Check out the Kaiser union-busting! I wonder if some Kaiser manager casually told the employees where they could file their complaint? I was ordered to switch temp agencies because the managers were vociferously hostile to unions and wanted to avoid the possibility I might be covered by one. The Labor-Management Partnership is such a charade.
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