Healthcare Giant Faces IT Nightmare 342
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."
Re:maybe they can merge (Score:5, Insightful)
Woo-Hoo! (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
Why the hell do they use Citrix? (Score:4, Insightful)
"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."
99.5% availability is par for the course. (Score:4, Insightful)
Citrix? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not surprising at all (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:5, Insightful)
-nB
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:3, Insightful)
Get used to IT (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Woo-Hoo! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Woo-Hoo! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the way medical insurance is *designed* to work. It's a net loss as long as all we need is routine stuff (like wisdom tooth extractions). And we accept that in the understanding that in the case of a severe, traumatic injury--something we just wouldn't be able to pay for *at all* otherwise--we'll be covered.
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope they get this thing right (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:99.5% availability is par for the course. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why the hell do they use Citrix? (Score:1, Insightful)
You gave examples of legacy applications. The post you were replying to, was why anyone would use it for non-legacy, new apps. For a new app, you can use much less fucked-up stuff than Citrix.
For remote access to new apps, just make it a web app. Even X11, as lame as it is, is going to be better than Citrix. Citrix only makes sense when you're locked into a Windows desktop app -- i.e. old stuff that no one in their right mind would start freshly developing today (or in the last 5-10 years).
Re:Woo-Hoo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:3, Insightful)
Citrix or anything else (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:The UK version (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
Re:well this obviously can't be right (Score:3, Insightful)
Then I'd be interested in this premise of a free market healthcare system.