Kaiser Permanente: Failure to Thrive — A Managed Care Watch Web Site

Kaiser Permanente Thrive Exposed

November 15th, 2006 at 10:56 pm

Kaiser/Epic PR disguised as news

Kaiser and Epic are going to great pains to do damage control and spread the positive PR in a new article by Wisconsin Technology Network, including planting a positive comment by a Kaiser employee who swears that HealthConnect is “beyond a doubt the best medical record” she has ever used. Unfortunately there are plenty of employees at Kaiser who don’t agree with that obviously scripted comment by Jill Oberheim, according to an Epic employee himself. After returning from a business trip to Kaiser, he posted the following on his personal blog:

“It was interesting to see how a company can love the software and Epic as a company, whereas the users at that same company hate it and quit over it.”

We would provide a direct link, but as soon as the post was pointed out on CorpHQ, he modified the above comment to read:

“It was interesting to see how a company can love the software and Epic as a company, whereas the users at that same company hate it and quit over being ‘forced’ to use it. I guess to the caregiver it’s harder to see that it’s a move done for the patient and for improving patient care when all you know is know you have to ‘use the computer to do that.’”

Gee, do you think the PR departments of Kaiser and Epic had anything to do with that little rewrite of history? It’s all about the patients and those silly caregivers just don’t get it. Shhh…don’t tell anyone that they can’t even figure out which bed the patients are in during the “code white” incidents, according to Kaiser’s own outage reports.

The Google cache of the original blog post is still available as of this writing, so see for yourselves. Once Kaiser and Epic see this we’re sure Kaiser will use its direct line to Google to disappear it immediately, but of course we have screen shots of the Epic employee’s blog before and after for archive purposes.

This latest article looks a lot like Kaiser/Epic PR disguised as news, and we find it extremely interesting that Justen Deal was not asked to participate. Another one of those moments that make you go hmm…

Previously:

Internal rumblings at KP

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