Kaiser Permanente has completed implementation of its outpatient electronic health record (EHR) system, HealthConnect™.  Kaiser reports that all 8.6 million of its members in nine states (California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, Virginia and Ohio) and Washington D.C. are now covered by an outpatient EHR.

In the press release announcing the completion of HealthConnect, Kaiser Chairman and CEO George Halvorson spoke about the achievement:

Electronic medical records are a cornerstone tool for improving quality and safety in health care. Doctors should have all of the information about all of their patients all of the time. Only a computer and an EMR can do that work.

Kaiser has a document addressing key points about the system, such as privacy, patient safety and accessing information online.

Jack Cochran, MD, executive director of the Permanente Federation saw the full deployment as the beginning of a larger process of improving care:

I see this milestone as the starting line. We have these tools, and now we need to learn how to use them to transform the delivery of health care, so it is no longer about how many appointments we make, but about how many problems we solve.

To that end, Kaiser also announced that an "aggressive implementation schedule" will continue this year, with 14 additional hospitals set to roll out HealthConnect's inpatient capabilities by the end of the year.

Source: Kaiser Permanente