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.
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Over the last week I've toured the health care blogosphere to express my concerns about the recent Healthcare Blogging Summit. My chief concern was that the Summit reinforced the credibility of PR bloggers and other professionals (physicians, lawyers, consultants, etc.) who already enjoy the advantage of being backed by corporate resources and favored by the mainstream media - while helping to further marginalize and suppress bloggers who are trying to criticize corporate heavyweights. The focus of blog-inclusive news aggregators like Memeorandum and Tailrank on A-List blogs has further served to magnify the blogs blessed by the business world while reducing the potential of the blogosphere as a whole of serving as a vehicle for alternative points of view.
To my surprise, several of the organizers of the Healthcare Blogging Summit responded to my concerns thoughtfully, and they had actually hoped for more representation of alternative and critical viewpoints on the panels. One organizer, Fard Johnmar, interviewed me.
Fard also points out Kaiser's recent foray into "blogger relations":
Kaiser is very interested in working with bloggers and may even deploy its own public facing blog in the future. As a result, they are very interested in working with bloggers to communicate their position on the Deal e-mail and other issues.
Kaiser employees have also been attending blogging and social media conferences. This is part of my complaint: Kaiser is trying to hijack the platform for communication and block or swamp criticism instead of addressing it. Kaiser can throw money and hordes of employees at this endeavor: the people with the technical skills and willingness to put in herculean amounts of unpaid work to hold onto a place for alternative points of view are very, very few. Kaiser already gets to push their story through canned news. They should leave the blogosphere alone.
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In other news, Matthew Holt has started to cover Kaiser's health care plan for California. Strangely, this is not the money-grubbing plan that Kaiser CEO Halvorson proposed last month in his capacity as chairman of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Perhaps it's more geared to reinforce the proposal that Don Perata, the Dem leader of the CA Senate who also represents Oakland (re: Kaiser's HQ). Honestly, I can't tell from either article. Maybe everyone is just trying to get on the health care bandwagon, and speed of soundbyte is more important than actually making sense.
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LOL! Kaiser wants to get into the "Web 3.0 killer app" couples counselling business....?
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The rise of social media has been a powerful tool for whistleblowers. One video on YouTube can be heard around the world, getting the concerns of the whistleblower out before corporate PR departments can shape public perceptions. This means the public is in an unprecedented position to help whistleblowers.
Whistleblowers make a terrible sacrifice when they take their concerns public. While corporations have the PR and legal resources to punish whistleblowers for stepping out of line, the public rarely steps up to protect whistleblowers because they have mixed feelings about anything that shakes the status quo.
Whistleblowers internalize the public ambivalence: I, for one, never promoted this blog for my own case - it was mainly just here for interested parties, and it gave me a way to respond when the mainstream media was propagating Kaiser PR. However, for the sake of another Kaiser whistleblower, I've made more of an effort recently. As part of that effort, I thought it might help to be explicit about what readers of this blog can do to help.
First, here's WHY you should help:
1) Are you against letting corporations destroy, re-arrange, and manufacture evidence to "manage" a favorable outcome to a situation?
2) Do you believe that whistleblowers should be able to rely on basic protections from corporate retaliation?
3) Do you want government oversight agencies to expedite acting on whistleblower complaints, quickly apply whistleblower protections, and remedy any initial mistakes they made that harmed the whistleblower?
4) Do you think whistleblowers should be able to freely express their concerns without needing a lawyer?
5) Do you believe the media should report on matters of public concern instead of helping corporate PR abuse or frame whistleblowers?
6) Do you believe the media should rapidly correct of matters of fact, even if the whistleblower is a person of no power or influence?
7) Do you want to prevent corporations from intimidating whistleblowers through filing fake lawsuits?
Now here are seven tips on HOW you can help:
1) For my own case, I posted a list of people to contact. This same list can be used to help other whistleblowers in California, and I welcome suggestions about what I should add to it. Contact political representatives to make sure they quickly activate the appropriate whistleblower protection measures (and, more importantly, so they know that the public doesn't want them to villify the whistleblower: otherwise political representatives go with how the media is reporting it). Contact the media so they will know the readers are interested in exposing corporate shenanigans more than slamming the whistleblower.
2) If you have a web site or blog, it helps to blogroll and/or link to sources that offer the whistleblower's point of view. This is especially important if the mainstream media is already being dominated by corporate PR. For all the skepticism about the media in general, bloggers often rely on rehashing mainstream media content: that means they can easily end up as vehicles for corporate PR. A couple of weeks ago I caught a prominent blogger rehearsing falsehoods about Justen Deal. It took several comments to get her to consider where her assumptions had come from. This week she's on a panel of a blogger's conference, acting as an expert on blogger credibility and influence. But her sort of "credibility" is based on shunning independent blogs like mine in favor of citing mainstream media sources: i.e., her credibility is derived from the *reputation* of the mainstream media, not any gauge of the truth.
3) Of course if you're a blogger, it would really help if you blogged on the whistleblower's story. You might even be able to get an interview with the whistleblower. Do a podcast. See if you can get video.
4) If you don't own a blog, but you comment on them, you can help by offering a counterpoint every time you see a gross error in how a blogger has represented the whistleblower's situation or wherever you see comments obviously planted by corporate PR. I'm pretty good at tracking these, but I'm not omnipotent and I don't have the resources that corporate PR departments do. Justen at least has me - no one was there to help me with this when I was under Kaiser siege.
5) If you participate in social networking or social media sites where you can share blogs, news stories, and links, post the whistleblower's story. If there's video or podcast, post those on YouTube, etc. If the whistleblower has a podcast or video, add it to your public playlists. If you know of some forum frequented by people with the professional skills/resources to advocate for someone going up against a big corporation, point them to the whistleblower's story.
6) If you're a recruiter, HR representative, or hiring manager, you can take action to counter the public belief that whistleblowers will never be hired again. Corporations are only able to use that as a threat against whistleblowers because HR gurus have been harping on the dangers of digital dirt when they could be promising people that there's *nothing* corporate "issues managers" can do to destroy their chances for future employment. How about vowing not to Google prospective employees? How about making a public statement to the effect that you welcome job applications from people of integrity, including whistleblowers? At the very least, don't perpetuate the intimidation of whistleblowers through your own actions. Don't, for instance, decline hiring someone right after visiting their blog, lie about the reason, and then visit their blog several times a day every day thereafter (which not only emphasizes the role you've played in punishing whistleblowers, it shows you're a hypocrite since you actually love what they're doing).
7) Some people compulsively rip on whistleblowers without even reading their point of view. If the whistleblower has a blog or web site, please at least read what they have to say before tearing into them. Whistleblowers who have taken their concerns public are also often willing to answer questions, too. Try to avoid making assumptions based on whistleblower stereotypes: whistleblowers are individuals, with a variety of reasons for taking their problem public. Remember, a whistleblower who has gone public needs your help. Right now, the whistleblower experience is like crying "Rape" near a busy street - and then watching everyone cross the street away from you in order to gossip about your character and scalp tickets.
Many of the people who read this blog are filled with good will, and I hope at least some of you will be willing to convert that good will into action.
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