Slashdot Mirror
Healthcare Giant Faces IT Nightmare
Joan writes "Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the U.S., has spent about $4 billion on an unreliable electronic medical record system that is impacting patient care, according to a 722-page internal report revealed by Computerworld. The CIO resigned after the news came out, and CEO George Halvorson is telling the media that the goal is an alarmingly low 99.5% uptime and that all the problems are really just power outages. Yesterday, Slashdot covered a story about the possibility that the NHS in the UK could now claim the 'biggest IT disaster' prize, but Americans, fear not: so far, the Brits are running a much more efficient failure at $24,000 per physician per year, while America's KP is spending $76,920 per physician, per year on its failing project."
We have an opening for Dean of our MBA department. You are a shoo in. When can you start?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
We're Number 1! We're Number 1!
Huh?
You mean we're NOT in a competition to make health care unaffordable? Doh!
P.S. You'd think that a company selling healthcare (something on which people will spend any amount of theirs and others' money) could actually afford working generators and uninterruptible power supplies - if they can't afford it, then how does anyone else?
I have used Citrix and it solved some problems for us, but why the shell would you use Citrix for a new application developed from scratch? To me Citrix is a system to run legacy applications. Any time in the last 10 years I would think you would choose a platform that does not require a hack (multi user ms windows) to run.
"We're the largest Citrix deployment in the world," Deal said. "We're using it in a way that's quite different from the way most organizations are using it. A lot of users use it to allow remote users to connect to the network. But we actually use it from inside the network. For every user who connects to HealthConnect, they connect via Citrix, and we're running into monumental problems in scaling the Citrix servers."
Remember that we're talking application uptime, not server uptime. This means that for any multi-server and multi-tier application, application uptime is essentially the product of the uptime of all servers that make up the app. Factor in that windows makes up the bulk of application servers and that people often have weekly scheduled downtimes that are in the hours, and 99.5% is actually quite ambitious.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Don't send a boy to make a mans job. AS/400!
The dirty secret of the software industry is that if you need a complicated piece of custom software, you're going to pay *huge* amounts of cash to have it developed, and it's never going to work right.
Anyone who has worked in the IT industry for a while knows the sheer HORROR of most the "niche" software products that big businesses need. They're universally terrible. The people that make that stuff have no incentive to make their product GOOD. They only care about making it marginally functional, so they can make sure their customers have to pay them support fees for eternity.
The term clusterfuck comes to mind...
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
The efficiency is only over the long haul. The advantage of a free-market system is that, when large organizations get sufficiently bad, they fail and are replaced by other, presumably more efficient, ones. It is painful and takes years to happen, but they do. In a centralized economy, large, stultified, inefficient organizations are coded into law and can't fail until there is a revolution.
Congratulations,
Make a system to save money on efficiency to be totally inefficient.
Actually, what will be found out (in the near future) that consolidating medical records, precribing, admissions -or- billing on a large system will be so unwieldy that the organization will be hurt more if it's attempted then it could ever make things better. This is not to say that it is impossible, but the myriad of laws, policies, regulations, and over-lapping dependencies will set it up to fail.
I found it especially interesting that a mere power-outage grinds the system to a halt as apparently they don't appear to have any plans for that, but to blame Citrix for their implementation woes is going abit overboard. An organization that big should stick with regional datacenters then to put all its eggs in one basket.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
The first word in "free market" is "free". That's free as in unhindered, unrestricted, unencumbered, etc. The US medical industry is not a free market, as there is a bewildering array of non-market forces hindering, restricting and encumbering it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
there's no such thing as a completely free market. your argument is the free-marketers equivalent to the communist saying "oh, but there's never been a -real- communist government, so just pointing at the litany of the failures of communism doesn't mean anything."
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
From the perspective of a patient, at least, "health care" IT is in the stone age. Can't set appointments over the Internet. Providers don't use email. Billing involves multiple pieces of paper. Getting a prescription filled involves shuttling a piece of paper with scribbles on it. Records retrieval depends of pieces of paper not getting lost. At first glance the KP system is promising and could ulimately lead to untold cost savings. Unfortunately, at least to an ignorant observer like me, it seems that only the big, integrated systems like Kaiser, the VA, and the military have any hope of ever getting some modern IT, at least as long as the US politicians keep their heads up their asses and refuse to do anything about this country's absolutely dysfunctional and outrageously expensive "health care system".
Penny - plain text accounting
The non-profit organization pulled in $3.3 billion in profits, eh?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
>"We're the largest Citrix deployment in the world," Deal said.
Alarm bells should have gone off.
>"We're using it in a way that's quite different from the way most organizations are using it"
When you make a pair of statements like that, you're really saying "We've just taken on more technical risk that we understand".
The US healthcare system has lots of problems, but it is already a free market. Many people argue that changing that would make things worse, not better.
And many who argue that also ignore the tiny detail that many western countries have a healthcare system that is at least as good and is upto 50% cheaper.
"Your argument has two problems: 1. A perfect communist government would still fail. 2. The more capitalist a nation is, the more prosperous it is (you don't need to have a completely capitalist nation to see it's effects)."
What a pile of bollocks.
Take Cuba for instance.
The US government refuses to allow free trade with Cuba because Cuba would become a wealthy and prosperous country if free trade was allowed. Just the tourism income to Cuba would be enormous and enough for it to become wealthy.
The US government would *never* allow a Communist nation to be successful as it would show that Communism *is* feasible, and that capitalism isn't the only way (which would be to the detriment of US corporate profits).
The US government has and will continue to do everything in its power to prevent that from happening.
not to tinfoil hat here but... maybe they are viewing the end user as the government so they can have easier access to everyones medical records. Not necessarily for evil means, maybe for census and planning info but once its all in one place its too easy to abuse
Will wash cars for karma
Kaiser is not being "oppressed", they are simply overpaying. They pass that right on down the line to their policyholders. Also, since they operate hospitals, they are in fact being shafted.
I know that, on the surface, it seems like no big deal that poor people get free medical care at the expense of big companies. The problem is that these big companies are starting to close their hospitals in poor areas - reducing the overall healthcare availability for poor people.
Like I said, unfunded mandates are generally not good for anybody.
And the US healthcare system is not a "free market".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Talk to me about free market when I can take my dandy time selecting a hospital - a casual search due to some semi to fully egregious injury - and when I can ask them for a quote to fix it up front - give or take 10%. I would also like readable bills minus the bullshit.
Then I'd be interested in this premise of a free market healthcare system.