Entry tags:

kaiser manipulates media, kaiser permanente, kaiser tech, kaiser workers

Kaiser Cleans House in Hawaii
And the (mafia) hits just keep on coming: Kaboom!

I wonder what the final straw was? Could it be the impending employee revolution in Hawaii? Could it be that Kaiser's finally taking a hard line against financial incompetence? Maybe it's a Leland Wong-esque problem or board corruption? Could it be the ongoing EMR boondoggle that sucked up 25% of Kaiser's capital outlay in 2004 and now has Kaiser begging for vendor mercy? Perhaps there's a horror not yet revealed - another Kaiser transplant list deathtrap or a budding government scandal? Or is Halvorson just purging anyone who isn't in his downline before they can band together for a palace coup?

I actually predicted this would happen the day Halvorson announced that they were going to buy their EMR (Electronic Medical Record) from Epic. Kaiser is now in the vendor's pocket, and their whole organization is tangled with project managers and "communications issues". The real tragedy is that many, many, many people saw this coming three years ago.

Update: Yeah, I'm suuuure this was a totally unbiased study upholding Kaiser's desire to extract cash up front, while you're still bleeding on the floor of the ER. And let's not forget that the first module (and for a while the only module) of the EMR that Kaiser installed was the billing system. It's all money-grubbing all the time with these people!

Update 2: Someone just asked me how Halvorson's claim of the upcoming $7 billion in losses jives with Kaiser's 2005 end-of-year $500,000,000 payout to the doctors. And is that all the doctors (re: pension plans), all the doctors who got bonuses, or just the "shareholders"? Any takers?

Update 3: Justen has pointed out that Kaiser employees are being subjected to propaganda about the success of Kaiser's budget-sucking EMR, while in truth the system is faltering: Epic outages have increased from just over 9,000 user hours per month in June to over 59,000 last month. If anyone wants to see what these outages being dealt with in situ, here's an extract from a Kaiser critical incident whiteboard (emphasis mine):

Fri, 6 Oct 2006 10:38:19 Issue is thought to have been going on since August and was called in on 10/3. it was today on 10/6 that the decission to halt claims proccessing was made - reference ticket number HD0000001887810
Fri, 6 Oct 2006 10:54:04 Status - prod and non-prod membership systems were pointed at Diamond - prod and test data fed into Diamond since August 2006. This caused test transactions to reach prod Diamond - interfaces have been corrected, corrective action needs to be taken to address data integrity issues in Diamond, causing claims processing to be halted as of about 30 mins ago - double-paid claims, claims incorrectly denied, wrong copay, etc. Potential KPHC impact due to claim accumulators in Diamond that summarize and total data for high-deductible plans, this could be used for determining benefit eligibility once passed to KPHC.
Fri, 6 Oct 2006 10:54:40 There were two databases in KMATE, one test and one production. For some reason they were both pointed to Diamond for data transfer. So Diamond was receiving good data from production, but bad data from the test environment. [Name Omitted] is now trying to figure out just how much data has been compromised and giving us an ETA on how mush is affected.
Fri, 6 Oct 2006 10:59:01 Could impact the collection of co-pay and if good data is being used to collect co-pay notified HC Swat
Fri, 6 Oct 2006 11:09:02 There were about 15000 records that came over from the test environment. There are three different types of transactions, members, group and coordination of benefits. There are about 125 people who are not able to do any work because claims is choosing not to process anything at this time.

(And later...)

Fri, 6 Oct 2006 14:31:26 Two outstanding problems. Over 15,000 MRN records that may need to be modified using correct production data. Over 5,100 MRN's from the 15,000 that were processed and may need to be adjusted due to incorrect information.. They will be sorting and trying to get more detail on what could be wrong.

And how do the EMR outages look to the health care workers who are trying to take care of people?

Oct 10t: I was ushered to one of the examining rooms to wait for the doctor to come in. I noticed a monitor in the room attached to a cart that had an ugly message saying, "Error - Server too Busy." Just then the nurse walked into the room to see me staring at the screen. "Do you know anything about computers?" I said, "Why don't you click on the Refresh button at the top of the screen." As she did Epic started running asking for her login and eventually coming to life again in all of its glory. "That's great," she said, "Now I can fix all the others in the department."

More juicy dish to come...!