CLEVELAND, Ohio — Kaiser Permanente is in the midst of a campaign to get more patients to use its online record system, emboldened by its number of users and new features that make the health-care provider think its system has come of age.
Kaiser thinks its My Health Manager can do something GoogleHealth and Microsoft Health Vault have a harder time accomplishing: getting patients to trust them. Kaiser is both a health insurer and a provider, so patients’ records aren’t being passed around to other companies that aren’t subject to some federal privacy regulations.
If it doesn’t do online health-records right, Kaiser risks losing its patients to other online health-record services — and potentially losing its grip on some of those patients entirely.
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Trust is the big selling point for many patient-centered health systems. Intuit, for example, has a similar sell with its health-finance software, Quicken Health Expense Tracker: You’ve trusted us with your taxes so why not your health bills?
Kaiser doesn’t do health finance. Instead, its features largely include making appointments, tracking visits, managing prescriptions, viewing test results and e-mailing physicians. The most popular feature is checking on real-time test results, said Gail Sands, Kaiser’s director of innovative projects in Ohio.
The company added direct patient-to-doctor e-mail two years ago. Some physicians resist electronic communication because they don’t trust it, fear lawsuits or violating the federal HIPAA privacy guidelines based on the content of an e-mail, or don’t think they are adequately reimbursed for the time it takes to answer patients’ messages.
The fact Kaiser employs the physicians helped speed acceptance, so to speak. The company essentially told it’s doctors that they would start using e-mail or stop working for Kaiser, said Dr. Nabil Chehade, Kaiser chief of urology and director of medical informatics in Ohio.
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Chehade said he knew of no cases whether a physician left over the policy.
“Care for the patient far surpasses a potential loss of revenue,” Chehade said.
Also, patients can’t directly e-mail physicians via an e-mail address. Instead, patients send a message through My Health Manager. Doctors are required to respond to direct e-mails by saying they cannot address the problem unless the patient uses the My Health Manager system, Sands said.
More than 3 million of Kaiser’s currently use the system, which is now in the nine states and District of Columbia where Kaiser operates (Ohio was the last region to get the service in October 2007). That figure was a tipping point for Kaiser, which in April launched an awareness campaign to get more patients to use its online record system.
But 3 million patients is still only about one-third of its 8.6 million members. Increased use will be based partly on whether it can cast Microsoft and Google as untrustworthy, even as both of those companies make the case that they are HIPAA compliant and serious about patient privacy.
Plus, Kaiser can’t beat other health-record companies for portability — the ability for a patient to take their records with them no matter who they use for their health care. Right now, patients who use Kaiser can’t take their records to another organization.
For Kaiser to get higher enrollment, they need to be more like Microsoft and Google and create a system that let’s Kaiser customers take their records with them if they decide to leave Kaiser, Chehade said.
“If I’m going to say as Kaiser Permanente I give you software and let you store your information but once you become a non-member the software license expires and you won’t be able to use it, this is where they will go and look for something like Google or Microsoft,” Chehade said.
“We don’t have a day where that’s going to happen, but that’s where the vision is,” he said. “If we’re going to do this we have to give it to them in a way that it will be portable even if they’re not a member of Kaiser Permanente anymore. Otherwise they will not buy into it.”