Kaiser Permanente EHR System Facts -
KP HealthConnect Electronic Health Record

KP HealthConnect™ is a comprehensive health information system that includes one of the most advanced electronic health records available.  When fully deployed, it will connect 8.6 million people securely to their health care teams, their personal health information, and the latest medical knowledge - taking advantage of Kaiser Permanente's integrated approach to health care. Ultimately, KP HealthConnect will help members and Kaiser Permanente professionals communicate with greater ease and convenience.

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.  We believe the project will improve the quality of our care and service to our members. It will ensure patient safety and quality care by providing access to comprehensive patient information and the latest best practice research in one place. KP HealthConnect will also coordinate patient care between the physician's office, the hospital, radiology, the laboratory, and the pharmacy - and will eliminate the pitfalls of incomplete, missing, or unreadable charts. The system will ultimately enable us to streamline and retire many outdated systems. When fully deployed, it will directly or indirectly support the majority of our hospital and health plan operations nationwide.

A recent media report referenced that the California Department of Managed Health Care had made inquiries in regard to KP HealthConnect. Where does it stand?
The California Department of Managed Health Care submitted a number of questions to Kaiser Permanente on January 3, 2007, regarding stories that had appeared in the media about KP HealthConnect on the general topic of system outages. We responded to all of the agency's questions on January 25, 2007 and we will continue to work with them should they have additional inquiries.

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."

What is the current state of KP HealthConnect availability for Kaiser Permanente caregivers? How does this compare in general to the rest of the health care industry
Our goal is to have KP HealthConnect available for use everywhere and every time it is needed to provide care and service to our members. Our technical goal for system availability is 99.7 percent.  We currently average 99.2 percent, and we are aggressively working to meet our ultimate availability goal. We hold ourselves to a high standard when measuring KP HealthConnect availability.

"When a patient arrives for care in the emergency room in a hospital without an electronic health record, basic patient information is almost always not available," says George C. Halvorson, chairman and CEO, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals. "Given in traditional nonemergency exam rooms, paper charts normally are not available more than 30% of the time. By contrast, KP HealthConnect is ensuring that Kaiser Permanente's members' records are available more than 99% of the time. This is a huge improvement overall. KP HealthConnect is a challenging project that is setting a standard that the rest of the world can learn from. It's the right effort at the right time and the right people are doing it." In the case that the system is not available, we have backup systems and documented downtime procedures in place to ensure we can continue to care for our members.

Where are you in deployment?
Administrative support applications for scheduling, registration and billing are now live across every one of our eight regions and the providers for more than 4 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.

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 two 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.