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Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect® Electronic Health Record

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Frequently Asked Questions

Kaiser Permanente’s leaders of Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect®, Jed Weissberg, MD, senior vice president, quality and care delivery excellence and Phil Fasano, senior vice president and chief information officer of Kaiser Permanente Information Technology, answer some frequently asked questions about Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect®:

What kind of care and service improvements are you seeing with KP HealthConnect?
KP HealthConnect’s built-in treatment guidelines are helping us improve the management of common/chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, reducing cardiac deaths and increasing breast cancer screening. We are also improving patient safety by increasing the accessibility of the patient medical record. Industry studies show that a paper medical record is missing up to 30 percent of the time for an office visit and paper medical records are almost never available for patient care in an emergency room. With KP HealthConnect, the electronic health record is available when and where it is needed.

Because KP HealthConnect includes more comprehensive patient information, it helps caregivers address multiple problems and/or the provision of multiple services in a single visit, reducing the need for additional follow-up appointments. And our online features (e.g., secure e-mail to your doctor’s office, checking lab-test results online, etc.) have brought our members unprecedented access to Kaiser Permanente care. By logging on to kp.org, members have the ability to address some of their needs online, instead of coming in for an office visit or spending time playing phone tag.

Members are showing their satisfaction with online health care tools available through kp.org by logging on in increasing numbers.

What are some of the challenges you have faced?
No comparable scale electronic health record has ever been deployed so rapidly. As is expected with a project this large and an organization as diverse as Kaiser Permanente, we have had to overcome our share of obstacles. For the first time, all eight of our regions are operating on a common technology platform through KP HealthConnect. A change of this magnitude required significant IT infrastructure upgrades, as well as a level of cross-regional collaboration that had not been required previously.

In addition, this conversion had a profound impact on the day-to-day work of our physicians, clinicians and staff. Beyond moving from paper to electronic processes, we did extensive examinations of workflows and care practices to optimize the care our members receive throughout our system. This required significant training and support to our existing staff and clinicians as well as integrating new staff into preexisting fully-deployed facilities.

How are KP-IT and KP HealthConnect related?
At Kaiser Permanente, we have adopted the mantra that “there are no IT projects.” Though KP HealthConnect is an information technology deployment, its primary purpose is to support patient care and service. Therefore, during the deployment stage, the project was not overseen by Kaiser Permanente Information Technology (KP-IT), but instead as part of the Quality and Clinical Systems Support department for Kaiser Foundation Health Plan/Hospitals and The Permanente Federation’s Clinical Information Support program, with KP-IT as a valued partner, managing the technical infrastructure of the system.

Once the deployment phase was largely complete, we entered the stabilization and optimization stage. At that time, KP HealthConnect transitioned from project status to ongoing maintenance, and the KP HealthConnect project team was integrated into KP-IT as a special care delivery business unit under Phil Fasano, chief information officer and senior vice president.

Why did you choose an external vendor for this project?
Our core competency is not in writing computer programs; it is in providing health care. In 1999, Kaiser Permanente initiated a proprietary clinical information system strategy enterprisewide. However, the scope of the internal development of the CIS project was limited, focusing solely on an outpatient medical record.

In reviewing external vendor options, we found that software companies specializing in health care IT could provide an expanded application portfolio, including outpatient clinicals, inpatient clinicals and practice management application. They could also provide a Web interface for members and providers and reporting capability. Moving to an external vendor allowed us to develop a comprehensive system that leverages many facets of our integrated care delivery system.

Though Epic Systems is our primary vendor in the deployment of KP HealthConnect, the system actually integrates a number of different applications beyond Epic’s product offerings, including applications provided by IBM, Vignette, Right Fax, Ingenix and PerSe.