|
-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
Page(s) 1
| 
Print
Comment
Email
Digg
Del.icio.us
Reddit
Twitter
