About Kaiser Permanente
Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect® Electronic Health Record
Overview
Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect® is Kaiser Permanente’s comprehensive health information system that includes one of the most advanced electronic medical 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.
KP HealthConnect facilitates communication between members and Kaiser Permanente professionals to help make getting well and staying healthy even more convenient.
Why is Kaiser Permanente investing in KP HealthConnect?
The development, implementation, and maintenance of KP HealthConnect represents a multi-billion dollar strategic investment for Kaiser Permanente. The project has already improved the quality of our care and service to our members where implemented, 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 The fully-implemented system has enabled us to streamline and retire many outdated systems.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.
How has Kaiser Permanente designed its electronic health record to improve and enhance its quality of care and the safety of its patients?
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’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, 80,000 members sign onto My Health Manager each month and our patients send more than 500,000 secure e-mail messages each month to our doctors and care teams. In his August 2008 report on personal health records, California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner noted that Kaiser Permanente has more than four times the percentage of members using electronic health records — 22.1 percent — than the state average.
Where are you in deployment?
In May of 2008 Kaiser Permanente completed implementation of outpatient electronic health records in all regions. We continue to update and implement additional outpatient electronic health record functionality throughout all our regions.
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, and that connecting patients directly with their care providers and giving online access to important medical information was critical in adoption of online tools.
Administrative support applications for scheduling, registration and billing are now live across every one of our eight regions and the providers for more than 8 million of our members are actively using the outpatient medical record in their daily care.
In addition, more than 95 percent 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 2008, our members exchanged over 6 million secure e-mails with their doctors and securely viewed over 16 million lab test results online.
We are also making significant progress in our hospitals. We have successfully deployed inpatient pharmacy, ADT (admission, discharge, and transfer) and billing applications in the majority of our hospitals and we have fully deployed an inpatient clinical record, including computerized physician order entry (CPOE) in 24 of our hospitals.
KP HealthConnect is, in fact, the largest civilian 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.