About Kaiser Permanente
Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect® Electronic Health Record
Overview
Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect® is Kaiser Permanente’s comprehensive health information system, which includes one of the most advanced electronic health records available. It securely connects 8.6 million people to their health care teams, their personal information, and the latest medical knowledge, leveraging the integrated approaches to health care available only at Kaiser Permanente. In March 2010, we completed the implementation of KP HealthConnect in each medical facility — 454 medical offices and 36 hospitals. The system facilitates communication between members and Kaiser Permanente professionals to help make getting well and staying healthy even more convenient.
The development, implementation and maintenance of KP HealthConnect represent a multi-billion dollar strategic investment for Kaiser Permanente. The project improves the quality of our care and service to our members, and we believe that trend will continue. It ensures patient safety and quality care by providing access to comprehensive patient information and the latest best practice research in one place.
KP HealthConnect also coordinates patient care between the physician’s office, the hospital, radiology, the laboratory and the pharmacy — and it helps to eliminate the pitfalls of incomplete, missing, or unreadable charts. The fully implemented system has enabled us to streamline and retire many outdated systems. KP HealthConnect directly or indirectly supports the majority of our hospital and health plan operations nationwide.
In addition, KP HealthConnect is an innovative tool that enables Kaiser Permanente to deliver high-quality, safe and efficient care in new and unique ways. The system supports the organization’s commitment to preventive medicine by giving clinicians access to the latest treatments and protocols to make sure its members receive the right care at the right time.
“We met with Kaiser when they were in the planning stages of KP HealthConnect. From the beginning I’ve been impressed with how well-planned this gigantic effort is,” says James Walker, MD, FACP, chief medical information officer and director of the EHR Safety Institute with Geisinger Health System. “They have carefully balanced the needs and perceptions of all eight of their regions. Kaiser Permanente’s vision of having a system that includes careful ways of including local flexibility is a well-thought out, well-executed approach to balancing standardization with flexibility.”
With secure e-mail messaging through My Health Manager, patients can communicate with their doctors at any time, from anywhere. Demonstrating the growing consumer interest in online health management, up to 80,000 members sign on to My Health Manager each month, and our patients send more than 850,000 secure e-mail messages each month to our doctors and care teams.
KP HealthConnect includes bedside documentation, clinical decision support and bar-coding for medication administration. The system’s full implementation in both inpatient and outpatient settings paves the way for further information sharing that will improve the future of health care for years to come.
We are sharing our findings and best practices that a comprehensive electronic health record can increase consumer convenience and satisfaction and provider efficiency, while maintaining clinical quality. In addition, we found that connecting patients directly with their care providers and giving online access to important medical information is critical in the adoption of online tools.
All of our members have access to portions of their KP HealthConnect record via kp.org, including the ability to securely e-mail their doctors and view most lab test results online. In 2009, our members exchanged over 8 million secure e-mails with their doctors and securely viewed over 21 million lab test results online.
KP HealthConnect is the largest private deployment of an electronic health record in the world. With the exception of a few government-deployed systems (the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs), there are few models for a health care information technology (IT) project this broad in scope.
