Two great stories on page one of the Wall Street Journal today.
One is a followup to yesterday's story about Thailand standing up to Abbott Laboratories about drug pricing, and about how "Abbott's troubles in Thailand suggest that cracking the new markets can be tough because governments are driving a hard bargain on price."
The other story is about "how an e-mail rant jolted a big HMO." Excerpt:
On a Friday morning last November, Justen Deal, a 22-year-old Kaiser Permanente employee here, blasted an email throughout the giant health maintenance organization. His message charged that HealthConnect -- the company's ambitious $4 billion project to convert paper files into electronic medical records -- was a mess.In a blistering 2,000-word treatise, Mr. Deal wrote: "We're spending recklessly, to the tune of over $1.5 billion in waste every year, primarily on HealthConnect, but also on other inefficient and ineffective information technology projects." He did not stop there. Mr. Deal cited what he called the "misleadership" of Kaiser Chief Executive George Halvorson and other top managers, who he said were jeopardizing the company's ability to provide quality care.
"For me, this isn't just an issue of saving money," he wrote. "It could very well become an issue of making sure our physicians and nurses have the tools they need to save lives."
Read the whole story. Especially with all the claims being made about the power of health information technology and what can be achieved by conversion to electronic medical records, it is enlightening to hear a bit about one insider's view.
Posted by schwitz at April 24, 2007 08:25 AM | TrackBack