Internal Email Blast Questions Kaiser’s CEO IT Plan; CIO Resigns
Last week a Kaiser employee named Justen Deal sent an email to 50,000+ employees raising concerns about (to vastly simplify) the company’s financial health because of a $3+ billion deal with Epic Systems would fail to deliver. Deal alleges that CEO George Halvorson had pre-selected EPIC to run the HealthConnect system since his arrival in 2002. Deal has been put on administrative leave and Halverson issued a rebuttal to his email as well as announced the sudden resignation of CIO Cliff Dodd. A Kaiser spokeswoman told Modern Healthcare that his departure had nothing to do with Deal’s email.
The technical issues raised are complex which makes it even harder to tell fact from speculation and form a definite understanding of what is going on at Kaiser. An interview with Justen Deal in HIStalk confirms he is an articulate person who does not really sound like a conspiracy-obsessed, disgruntled employee. A 722-page internal report seen by Computerworld also confims significant technical problems and relatively high downtime with the deployed system. Allegations that the system is poorly architected or implemented to scale to a huge user base like Kaiser’s seem credible, though whether Deal is fully qualified to back up some of the technical and corporate governance comments he made is questionable. It may be that serious but relatively mundane and solvable datacenter and network issues are being blown out of proportion. HIStalk has more comments today from its readers and the weblog’s author. See also Justen Deal’s fixkp.org site.
November 15, 2006 Related topics: People, Ethics & Scandals, Corporate Financials, Contract Awards, Quality, Safety, Errors, IT & software