OAKLAND, CA – It’s full speed ahead for Kaiser Permanente’s rollout of an Epic electronic health record system, censured last month by one of the healthcare organization’s supervisors.

Justen Deal, a publication project supervisor in the Health Education and Training Department at Kaiser Permanente’s Los Angeles facility, painted a picture of an IT project gone wrong. Kaiser placed him on paid administrative leave and marshaled its forces to respond to myriad questions about the condition of KP HealthConnect, the name assigned to the 10-year $3.3 billion project.

Kaiser, once hailed by the nation’s healthcare IT chief as a pioneer on the healthcare IT front, found itself defending its choices and discussing system outages that Deal pointed to and that were detailed in a 722-page internal report at Kaiser.

Kaiser would show America how to transform healthcare, former healthcare IT czar David J. Brailer said in a talk in August 2005.

Andrew M. Wiesenthal, MD, associate medical director of the Permanente Federation, the umbrella organization of Kaiser physicians, is still talking about Kaiser transforming healthcare.

Deal, however, sees nothing but trouble for HealthConnect. In a blog posting on his site Nov. 27, he writes: “The issues we are seeing with HealthConnect are the result of an ongoing and worsening series of failures encompassing all aspects of the Kaiser Permanente information technology infrastructure, including the infrastructure that has been put into place specifically to support HealthConnect.”

Wiesenthal, an architect and champion of KP HealthConnect acknowledges the problems experienced with slowdowns and down time.

“The infrastructure and data centers have had power problems,” he said.

“We have the largest Citrix department in the world,” said Wiesenthal. “We had to re-architect it, but we have.”

“We feel like we’re making extraordinarily good progress,” Wiesenthal said,  “We spent exactly what we expected to spend.”

The implementation involves 12,000 physicians across the country and 8.6 million health plan members.

Kaiser expects the outpatient portion of the project to be fully implemented in 2008, with the in-patient portion done in 2009.

Kaiser has eight operating regions – two large ones in California and six others from Hawaii to the Mid Atlantic.

In the regions where the system has been deployed – in Hawaii and the Northwest and one hospital each in Northern and Southern California, everyone slated to use the system is using it,” Wiesenthal said.

“We’ll make sure the two deployments are working well,” Wiesenthal said, “then we’ll move on to other hospitals”

“In the middle of all this, we’ve already done an upgrade.” he said.