Internal reports have detailed hundreds of technical issues and outages. The Electronic Medical Records system of Kaiser Permente has been nothing short of an IT project gone awry. Questions began to rise when Cliff Dodd, the company’s CIO, resigned. Dodd stepped down January 14, 2010 after another Kaiser employee, Justin Deal, sent a memo to every company worker warning of technological and financial repercussions related to the rollout of the nearly $4 billion system from Epic Systems Corp. Deal said he also sent letters to Kaiser management expressing his concerns. But in internal memos, officials said they investigated those concerns and denied that the implementation of the Health Connect system has been a failure. The system is suppose to give more than 100,000 of Kaiser’s physicians and employees instant access to the medical records of some 8.6 million patients, along with e-messaging capability, computerized order entry and electronic prescribing. In addition, the system is suppose to integrate appointment scheduling, registration and billing functions and will offer various features to Kaiser members through KP.org. A power outage on May 9, 2009 at Kaiser’s data center in Corona, California, lasted for 55 hours and 7 minutes and affected the ability of numerous health care facilities to access the Health Connect system. This outage affected every Kaiser Permente region. Providers/clinicians across KP would not have access to medical information to treat members, process lab and pharmacy requests, and in some cases were in full down-time modes compromising direct member treatment, with the inability to access current medical information for decision making
Kaiser Believes EHR Has Been A Success
Two Kaiser Permente studies done by senior leadership have shown that the electronic health record system of Kaiser has increased
