California looks into Kaiser's EMR troubles

Regulators say they are satisfied so far that Kaiser Permanente is correcting its problems, but they are keeping their eye on the project.

By Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews staff. March 12, 2007.

A California regulator is investigating purported problems with the installation of Kaiser Permanente's $4 billion electronic medical record system. But a leader of the HealthConnect project says progress is "spectacular."

Kaiser Permanente has been publicly vouching for its EMR ever since last fall, when a mass e-mail sent by a Southern California Permanente Medical Group employee claimed tests showed the system suffered frequent outages, claims backed up by an internal Kaiser document leaked to the media.

Also, the reported cost of the project has kept going up -- from an initial estimate of $1.8 billion in 2003, to an approved budget of $3.2 billion later that year, to a current estimate of $4 billion. In 2002, Kaiser had to write off a $442 million investment in an EMR system when it found the system could not accommodate the staff-model HMO's size.

With public reports showing the system available only 80% of the time -- a rate experts say makes it inoperable -- the California Dept. of Managed Care decided it wanted to look into the EMR's implementation.

There was concern that Kaiser "put a high premium on this electronic medical record system being its primary source for the exchange of information," department spokeswoman Lynne Randolph said.