Kaiser Permanente has a long history in computerized patient re...

Federal funding may be encouraging a move toward EHR, but there's more to it than just installing systems. How can healthcare data pooling lead to a better system? More at http://www.healthcaretownhall.com/...

I like the computerized records especially because I can log on and see test results and compare them to previous ones, but they have not really gone paperless. Since the computerized records, if you miss taking a test for some reason...like it's fasting and you have trouble fasting, they send you a letter. And another letter. And another letter. And another letter. For awile my husband and I were each getting two letters every other day.

And sometimes they are wrong. Once I got a reminder letter that I was overdue for my lipid profile in the same envelope with a letter with the results from my lipid profile.

The could save a lot of trees by emailing me with the same information since I am on their computer system.

Dr. Jeremy, why don't you take some of the loads of money you have and pay a software engineer to design something. You really don't care! layoff the forums,
put your money where your hipocracy is.Offer free health care for a weekend. Stop stealing rolex's. doctors are the most respected crooks their are

Health Information Technology (HIT) Solutions, have the Potential to Eliminate Fraud, Administrative Inefficenies, Reduced Healthcare Costs, and Improve Medical Outcomes, etc.
However, in order to Realized the full Potential of HIT, we need to have, a Full Scale INTEROPERABILITY of Electronic Health Records/Electronic Medical Records, Nationwide.
Proper Deployment of Health Information Technology Solutions, and Training can Increased Productivity (i, e, medical data mining, risks treatment, service delivery), Efficiency (i, e, medical errors, redundant and inappropriate care), and Costs Savings of around 20-30% of our Annual Healthcare Expenditures ($2.4 Trillions).
Please see: www.gkquoquoi.blogspot.com for summary Deployment Plan, for the Nationwide Health information Network (NHIN).
Gadema Korboi Quoquoi
President & CEO
COMPULINE INTERNATIONAL, INC.

It's to bad Kaiser outsourced there information technology to india support via ibm. is this american? kaiser founded by union?

Wow... this looks to be yet another Kaiser commercial disguised as a news article.

So, John Mattison co-invented data interchange of medical information? Wow. What an egotistical/megalomanic thing to claim. Does this "newspaper" actual check its facts? How about calling WEDI and HL7. There are working groups, comprised of dozens (if not hundreds) of people who have been working on this for decades. No one person invented or could rightfully claim to have "co-invented" any of the things listed.

Also, Mattison's comment about "scale" is utterly laughable. Kaiser's miraculous EMR was purchased from Epic Systems of Madison, WI (now Verona, WI). The "scale" that Mattison is talking about was already there in the Epic product.... and as a matter of fact, Kaiser's EMR is still (and will continue to be) run as separate instances, on different hardward, etc.. The Northwest Region is on its own separate instance (and there are ~ a dozen in California alone). So, Dr. Mattison basically shows that Kaiser's EMR doesn't scale. This might also explain why Kaiser has the world's largest Citrix installation.

Kaiser's implementation is, though, the world's most expensive of an EMR. This is not because vendors got fat deals, though, but because Mattison's own for-profit Permanente doctor/employees recharged their time into the purported not-for-profit run "HealthConnect" project. Mattison said Kaiser dedicated $4B in 2003. The public needs to know that this simply isn't true. Kaiser went on the record then and said it would be $1.8B. See the 2/4/2003 Wall Street Journal article p to verify the veracity of my claims. Also, thus far, the more credible total costs for Kaiser's implementation of a widely used commercial product has far exceeded $6B.

What should be interesting to see, though, is how Kaiser proves "meaningful use" in order to get ARRA dollars. Meaningful use should be tough for Kaiser to prove, since Kaiser already had other applications in use that performed the required functions. These were referred to as the "T2E" or "Transition to Epic" applications and included eChart, eOrder, and eRefill. Remember those Dr. Mattison? Also would be pretty tough to prove meaningful use for Kaiser Northwest since they replaced their installation of EpicCare with another installation of EpicCare (and moving from HP Unix to IBM Unix isn't meaningful use).

A real news article would explore when the for-profit Permanente doctor groups are going to pony up their 15% of the cost for the system? Let me see... 15% of $6B means that Mattison's for-profit physician group owes Kaiser (it's not-for-profit "partner") about $1B. If not, then it looks like Mattison, et al, are in violation of Stark. The clock is ticking...

Another topic that might be newsworthy is Dr. Mattison's reputed use of a fax machine in his car. Said fax in a Mercedes, though, is something I've heard described by numerous people and seems like a great use of precious health care dollars.