-Al Almado, director-IT, Kaiser Permanente Healthcare Services

The Kaiser health care company is one of America's largest, and has long been considered a benchmark of quality for the managed care quality. In the midst of the shipbuilding fury of World War II, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser set up a health plan to provide prepaid medical services to thousands of workers in his shipyard at Richmond, California. The workers were not a healthy lot. The army had rejected most of them, and Kaiser wanted to keep them on the job by tending to their illnesses and by offering preventive medicines. After the war, Kaiser expanded the health plan. He soon faced opposition from the medical establishment, which often branded his form of health care as “socialized medicine.”

Today, in the era of managed care, Kaiser Permanente has become the medical establishment. It is not only the oldest health maintenance organization (HMO) but also the largest in the US, with nearly 9 mn members and 10,000 doctors in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Kaiser's organizing and integrating services, a kind of one-stop shopping, made it a model for other HMOs. With over $35 bn in operating budgets, Kaiser has strongly gone in for automation. In an exclusive interview to Minu Sirsalewala of Dataquest, Al Almado, director-IT, Kaiser Permanente speaks about the organization's IT journey and the different IT trends visible in the healthcare space.

How critical is IT to support and deliver heath care services?
IT is the lifeline for us. It is not only a support mechanism but also the only delivery mode of our services. There is high investment in IT for the business infrastructure, as the entire model is dependent on this network set up. IT aligns with the business efforts and works as a mechanism to streamline the mission.  We have a program called 'HealthConnect' which is our most mission-critical application. It is an embedded system, which updates the data and makes it available to our million of users.

What best practices do you follow?
We are always looking at ways to improve the handling of our IT portfolio. How best can we execute the applications and deliver efficient services through them to our end customers. We partner with firms with in-depth business knowledge of health care and expertise in this space. Also there has to be a clear alignment with the business vision and IT projects.

As IT is so critical to our services, the vision has to be well articulated and in sync with the service vision. We create the right environment to attract and retain talent, as there has been a dearth of people in this segment. We provide intensive training and update our staff on new applications. It is imperative to align the IT efforts with the business forecasts, excepted expenses so that multiple projects can be aligned.

What are the trends in Healthcare?
This is an extremely dynamic industry with extensive services, and the dilemma is to upgrade and integrate. There are over 700,000 issuers in the US who apply for the regular care service. Every aspect of a medical service, right from the level of operation to the claim, is to be integrated. There is investment in IT at every level as it is 'the' application that runs in the background.

There is high advertising on web platform for health care and health management.

Web is the ubiquitous interface to track health report, and related activities.

There is a corporate directory project where all information and data related to compliances, individual billing, corporate billing, medical operation undertaken and the likes is updated, stored, tracked and made available for review to the end users.

What are the typical challenges?
The one big challenge has been the retention and ramping up of people. As the industry landscape is changing, there has been scarcity of talent, good qualified people for running applications. But the scenario is expected to change with more enterprise applications coming in and more talent getting trained.

Minu Sirsalewala 
minuvs@cybermedia.co.in  

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