Head of Kaiser's digital project quits - problems with the EMR : "The executive overseeing Kaiser Permanente's ambitious $3-billion push toward computerizing the medical records of its 8.6 million members resigned Tuesday, a sign of the challenges facing the project.
The resignation of J. Clifford Dodd, a senior vice president and chief information officer for Kaiser, came four days after another Kaiser employee sent a scathing e-mail to most of the company's 140,000 employees about his concerns over the high-profile technology project, known as HealthConnect.
In the e-mail, Justen Deal, a Los Angeles project supervisor who has worked on the new system, said Kaiser's switch to electronic medical records was proving far more expensive and unreliable than anticipated.
In an interview, Deal said cost overruns were common and that data showed the new software system breaking down so frequently that doctors and patients were often left for long periods without access to medical records.
He said 'the company is wasting hundreds of millions on the project and should consider scrapping it for a better one that can handle the scale of a company like Kaiser.'"
This is why an open source system which allows patients to control their medical records ( a PHR) linked to an EMR makes so much more sense ! Hopefully, other hospitals will learn from these expensive mistakes and not make them !
umm, the kaiser/epic system is open source. it also includes patient access the same record that doctors use.
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