I would like to start, rather than end this post, with huge thank you’s to:
Allan Rogers, MD, Kaiser Permanente’s National HealthConnect Team
Susan Campbell-Hartzell, Kaiser Permanente Internet Services Group
Without their help, Kaiser Permanente would not have been able to demonstrate kp.org, I’ll explain why.
We got the call (or rather, e-mail) a week before the Health 2.0 meets Information Therapy Conference in Boston, the premier event for the health care startup community (and which Kaiser Permanente is a Flagship Sponsor of): Would Kaiser Permanente be able to demonstrate KP HealthConnect and kp.org, connected to live servers, to this room of 450 health care patients, companies, and other leaders?
Piece of cake, we said. Except for the live server part. Even though this was the requirement of demonstrations at Health 2.0, we would not be able to do things this way, but it was still a lot of work, I’d like to assure everyone!
We only had a week to put together an integrated demonstration. A demonstration that was to last no longer than 3.5 minutes.
Now, I definitely believe that if you can demonstrate something in 10 minutes, you can do it in 3; the challenge is deciding what not to show in a health system that is so comprehensive in the way it does everything, not just health information technology. We also wanted to make this relevant next to really great work completed by Google Health and HelloHealth.
With several script revisions, test system password resets, and stocking of fictional patient records in a fictional system (i.e. one totally separate from the system patients, doctors, and nurses use every day), we created a few weeks in the life of Janet HealthConnect.
What we thought was best was to think about the things that Kaiser Permanente brings to Health Information Technology that complements Google, HelloHealth, and the entire Health 2.0 community. One of the biggest things that Kaiser Permanente brings is adoption – it’s good at this and it wants to share its expertise.
If Kaiser Permanente is demonstrating the future of health care in its medical centers, hospitals, and where its members live, work, and play today, this community is demonstrating the future of the future, and that’s why we need each other.
With that in mind, I asked Anna-Lisa Silvestre, VP of Online Services to serve as her letter turner. Kate Christensen, MD, the Medical Director of kp.org, was also close by as well. In the demonstration I prompted Anna-Lisa for several facts about the adoption of My Health Manager.
- When Janet logged in to My Health Manager, Anna-Lisa told the audience that 47,348,917 other visitors had logged in in 2008
- When Janet sent a secure e-mail to her personal physician, Dr. Rogers, Anna-Lisa told the audience that 6,078,838 other e-mails were also sent in 2008
- When Janet reviewed her HbA1c result, Anna-Lisa told the audience that 16,773,273 other results had been reviewed by patients online in 2008
- When Janet accessed the Health Encyclopedia to learn more about the HbA1c test, Anna-Lisa told the audience that 3,975,230 other visitors had in 2008
- When Janet booked an appointment online with Dr. Rogers, Anna-Lisa told the audience that 1,403,870 other appointments were booked online in 2008, and that these appointments were more likely to be kept.
We then joined Janet HealthConnect’s physician, Allan Rogers, MD, opening Janet’s incoming e-mail. This was a great place to point out that Kaiser Permanente’s maturity with a comprehensive electronic health record has created a focus less on optimizing the acute care visit in the EHR, more on the In Basket as a central place for multispecialty care coordination.
Dr. Rogers then demontrated some of the efficiencies created by the KP HealthConnect team which allowed him to review the patient’s care snapshot right in the In Basket, and then to respond to Janet’s message with full decision support available.
In this portion of the demonstration we showed capabilities beyond sending messages – messaging is designed as an activity that promotes the personal physician-patient relationship with the right information in every encounter.
We quickly stepped through the in person visit, ending with the After Visit Summary, which we used to demonstrate the commitment to service quality, in that AVS use is measured and tracked to ensure a great experience with every encounter.
I closed the demonstration with a screen shot of a patient list, which showed that there may be many Janet HealthConnects, or populations of patients with chronic illness, that can be monitored as a group and cared for by teams, right within KP HealthConnect.
Our final slide is the one pictured above, where Anna-Lisa made the announcement to the audience that My Health Manager adoption has surpassed 3 million members.
So the the things we wanted to show that health information technology can and should do (and has done at Kaiser Permanente) are:
With special thanks to the Health2.0 meets Information Therapy team for their support and to the entire Health2.0 community for being supportive, and critical. This is where innovation comes from!
