Kaiser had made a deal with Department of Managed Health Care that allows them to pay to keep their disastrous kidney transplant program in place. This will enable the current patients to get their transplants elsewhere, but Kaiser gets the chance to try its venture startup again when public attention dies down. This is risk management at its finest: pay the "cost of doing business" now, profit later.
Did the DMHC just not notice the death toll here? During the transplant program's first year, only 56 transplants were performed (with around 2000 people on the wait list) and newspapers are reporting that twice that number of people died waiting for a kidney. That's 112 real people. At other transplant centers across the state during that period, more than twice as many people received kidneys than died.
Kaiser killed those people, and the DMHC is helping them squirm out of it as usual.
By the way, Rick Malaspina, the guy who seems to be handling Kaiser's PR outreach this morning, is the same person who shamelessly lied to the press to say I "worked on the project" relating to the Systems Diagrams.
Update: I wonder if anyone is going to step back and look at the big picture of Kaiser's pharmaceutical fraud, Medicare fraud, indirect transcription outsourcing (Medquist), pay-for-dumping, court fraud, whistleblower retaliation, Federal lobbying, and occasional record tampering. My prediction is that people will finally start sniffing for mismanagement, waste, and fraud around Kaiser's EMR (HealthConnect). The billions of dollars spent on HealthConnect were internally justified thus:
[Kaiser] executives forecast that operating costs will drop by at least 10 percent when the system is completed, while expenditures on medical-record supplies alone will drop by as much as 50 percent.
Moreover, substantial revenue increases are projected both because doctors are expected to see as many as 10 percent more patients in a day, which would greatly increase the capacity of the HMO, and because more precise and timely bills could improve the amount that Kaiser collects for its services by as much as 15 percent. CIO Insight, "Pulling Kaiser's IT Out of Intensive Care", 10/15/05
There is of course no mention of passing these savings onto the patients who have been footing the investment bill. The real reason Kaiser has been relentlessly lobbying Congress and hawking their "branded" EMR on TV shows (such as the McNeil Lehrer News Hour) is that they plan to package HealthConnect with the population management data they've extracted from patients over the years and resell it to other HMOs and Medicare. If this happens, I hope there is litigation to pursue a distribution of the profits back to the members and the people whose medical conditions were unwittingly tapped to create Kaiser's population data goldmine.
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