Kaiser's $1.8-Billion EHR Project Remains on Track, Says Official
By Brian Reid, Health-IT World News
Few problems have been seen thus far in the rollout of the clinical component
of the multibillion-dollar KP HealthConnect electronic medical record project at
Kaiser Permanente, according to company officials.
The Epic Systems software has gone live in outpatient clinics in Hawaii and
across the healthcare system's Northwest region, where physicians were longtime
users of older Epic clinical software, with plans to begin using the system next
month in Kaiser's mid-Atlantic region.
"They like it a lot. It's relatively straightforward for people to
incorporate it into their day," said Andrew Wiesenthal, associate executive
director of the Permanente Federation, who added that no software glitches have
arisen during the implementation. "We don't experience serious technical
issues."
Wiesenthal said that the project continues to meet its internal deadlines,
rolling out service at most a few weeks later than the company predicted a year
ago. In addition to the go-live event for the mid-Atlantic region in August, the
company said it expects to introduce the clinical software to its Colorado and
southern California regions this fall.
To help identify and correct problems, Kaiser has generally been rolling out
the services slowly in each region, beginning in a single facility in a region.
That has allowed the company to monitor reaction to the program and tweak its
approach correspondingly.
The $1.8 billion project has not been without its challenges, Wiesenthal
conceded, but he said most of the issues that have come up relate to user
training. Kaiser is already applying lessons learned early in its experience in
Hawaii to improve the utility of its educational efforts by giving physicians a
larger dose of information about the specialty-specific features of the system
and less information about basic operation.
"They needed to spend more time than they did in incorporating their content
for their specialty," said Wiesenthal. "The balance on that kind of training
needed to be tilted toward that."
