Kaiser Permanente launches patient-accessible EMR

Some say giving patients online access to their health information makes practical and financial sense.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. March 10, 2003.

Will letting patients view their records online improve physicians' relationship with patients, workflow and the bottom line?

During the next three years, the industry will be looking to Kaiser Permanente for some answers as the huge Oakland, Calif.-based group shells out $1.8 billion to roll out paperless and patient-physician communication systems and make medical records accessible to patients over a secure Web site.

Kaiser will use a system developed by Epic Systems Corp., scrapping a homegrown system it had developed.

Kaiser, which has yet to determine what information patients will be able to access online, began testing the application last December in Oregon.

Kaiser Permanente, which employs 11,350 doctors and has 8.4 million patients nationwide, also plans to create a database containing anonymous patient data and to mine the data for best practices, said Francis J. Crosson, MD, executive director of The Permanente Federation.

"The most important piece of this [project] is that this is a tool that enables the doctor to care better for the patient," he said.

A handful of organizations, including CareGroup in Boston, already have done what Kaiser is planning. But none is investing as much or is as large as Kaiser. Thus, industry players will be keeping a close tab on what happens at Kaiser as they consider or roll out similar initiatives.

As patients are able to view their records online, they inevitably will have questions and become more active and engaged in their care, predicted Michael J. Barrett, senior analyst at Forrester Research.