Kaiser Kills More Patients
Holy cats - I look away five seconds and Kaiser accelerates its bad karma spree! First of all I'm going to direct everyone to Kaiser Thrive to read excerpts from articles that require registration, and I will link to the Kaiser Thrive posts in appreciation of all the work they do.

First, the L.A. Times reports that five Kaiser hospitals are deadly for people with pneumonia. Not exactly a surprise, but I'm glad the L.A. Times is continuing to buck the Kaiser-payola situation in California.

Second, Bruce Turkstra got dumped from the interim CIO position. The scuttle is that Turkstra made a number of changes based on the expectation he would keep the job, so I'm sure mucho membership $$$ were dedicated to his golden parachute/bribe.

Here's yet another Kaiser employee telling it like it is. I'm still waiting for a sign that Kaiser is actually getting the message. What Kaiser does to its own employees is unacceptable, and this mistreatment trickles down to sabotage patient care. Moreover Kaiser's practice of destroying evidence and choosing to manipulate perceptions over fixing the problem effects both employees and patients. It's a cultural problem, and this tone is being set by Halvorson and his team. UPDATE: The HealthConnect Corruption Scandal seems to be on fire!

In support of the letter posted by the Kaiser employee, I heard similar sentiments expressed about the situation from a completely different source. I think the abusive managers are going to have a tough time talking their way out of this one. And, once again, SHAME ON KAISER HR, for letting this sort of thing go on and for punishing the employees who try to seek help.

Congratulations to Justen Deal for being named Health Care IT's 2006 Industry Figure of the Year by the Hissies! ROTFLMAO!!!

Another ROTFLMAO - Kaiser sends out the PR panzer division in an attempt to roll over the L.A. Times expose of HealthDisconnect. Here is the internal Kaiser koolaid memo.

BizJournals ran an article on Kaiser's blogging strategy. Or anti-blogging strategy: it's just more gross attempts to manipulate the media. The article covers how Kaiser chickened out of the Health Care Blogging Summit once it found out critics would be on the same stage. The conference organizer pointed out that this is part of Kaiser's larger transparency problem.

I need a breather, but if there's recent Kaiser stupidacity that I missed, please post a comment, and I'll be happy to add it here.

Update: I almost forgot the funniest thing of all! Some Northern California Kaiser employee tried to hack into Kaiser Thrive yesterday! How lame! But also ROTFLMAO because the attempt is pretty bad.

Update2: Wow, my blog is under visitor seige right now! Hi to all newcomers. If anyone is so inclined, I'm trying to raise money so I can represent patient advocates at the Health Care Blogging Summit in April. You can chip in here. This blog has no advertising or sponsorship, and I don't work regularly myself (thanks to Kaiser). I would appreciate any help.