March 3rd, 2008
Kaiser rolling out its EMR nationwide
After five years of fits, starts and controversy, Kaiser Permanente has begun rolling out its $4 billion HealthConnect EMR system nationwide.
In Atlanta the marketing is backed by radio ads, even though the company’s Web site supports only Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. The technical conversion began in Georgia nearly two years ago. The effort is now picking up major editorial support.
Plans like Kaiser’s are an integral element in the health care business strategies of Microsoft and Google.
A Personal Health Record (which Google wants you to have) springs from an EMR held by someone like Kaiser. Microsoft is betting all hospitals and health plans will be under pressure to match Kaiser’s feature set.
Since there is no push from doctors or patients for EMRs, the top-down approach of Kaiser seems to be the only way to go, short of government action.
So Kaiser is using the hard sell, deploying all its public relations weapons toward bringing in business, and goodwill, from its investment. This after taking years of PR hits as the project was built.
A letter sent last week by Kaiser CEO George Halvorson (above) brags that his company is the only one with a complete database, because it includes both provider and payer data. It took just the extraction of data to do a ground-breaking study on caffeine and pregnancy. (The study said junk the java, mom.)
This may be just the first of many such studies, done simply by pulling gross data from an immense database and extrapolating it to the general population. Some of this will be paid for by others, defraying Kaiser’s investment.
So, has Kaiser turned the corner? And does this mean it’s full steam ahead for the EMR movement?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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