Kaiser Permanente announced Monday that all of its 8.7 million enrollees in nine states, including Hawaii, and the District of Columbia have access to HealthConnect, an outpatient electronic health record (EHR).
Kaiser said that its 13,000 physicians nationwide now have electronic access to patients' medical records across its 421 medical offices and clinics.
According to reports, the EHR system's deployment cost so far has been are now approximately $4 billion, including $1 billion for maintenance. Kaiser claims that HealthConnect is the world's largest private EHR system.
Kaiser still needs to finish up the inpatient (i.e., hospitalized patients) side of its EHR system, however. Kaiser said that 13 of its 36 hospitals (34 of them in California) have installed the EHR software, giving 3.2 million enrollees the advantages of an inpatient EHR system. Some 14 hospitals are scheduled to do so this year, including 13 in California and one in the Portland, Ore., metropolitan area.
The remaining nine hospitals, including the Moanalua clinic on Oahu, will follow in 2009 and early 2010.
According to Kaiser, "Physicians reported that, in many cases, electronic health records enabled them to identify and resolve patients' health issues in the first contact. One survey showed that, with the use of electronic health records, medication administration times and doses were more legible and correct (85 percent), and clinicians believed the electronic medication administration system provided a safer and more reliable communication tool (75 percent)."
It will be interesting to see if the Kaiser news will make it into the Presidential campaign, given that the candidates are touting health IT as a means to improve health care as well as reduce its costs.
Comments (3)
I linked to the site and could not find much about the system design even at a high level. It is interesting to note that security did not seem to be one of the Goals of this system. Wonder how long it will be before we read about a hacker getting access to millions of patient records. Would be nice to know if past patients records will be taken off-line once they leave Kaiser.
Posted by Mike | May 15, 2008 7:01 PM
Posted on May 15, 2008 19:01
If those numbers are true, their annual maintenance is $1B US for ~$9M patients or almost $111 in maintenance cost per patient. Currently we pay 1 FTE to manage a subset of our records with a cost of $30,000 [ salary] for over 3000 patients, that's a cost of $10 per patient. Is this cost effective?
While there are benefits in safety offered by computer systems, it is assumed this system will be cheaper in the long term, as demonstrated by the investments made by other industries. Until then, who is paying until these saving are realized? One hopes healthcare will be like Finance industry for records and transactions, but could it be like military spending, whose costs know only one direction, up? We can talk about being efficient and reducing growth rates, but if healthcare continues to find cures for new disease, maintain uncurable 'chronic illness', then growth continues with it is costs.
IEEE Member
Posted by Marv Gozum | May 15, 2008 7:40 PM
Posted on May 15, 2008 19:40
Once these records are created and in a database system, just how trustworthy and secure are they? How can one be sure who will have access – such as employers, life insurance companies and lawyers? We all want privacy in our lives especially with our health records. Then when a client of Kaiser Permanente changes to another health insurer, how does his medical record become available to his new doctors? That doesn’t seem likely. This electronic record keeping can be valuable but it also has many segments which need to be considered and monitored closely.
Posted by Paul Phillips | May 16, 2008 4:17 PM
Posted on May 16, 2008 16:17