David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…There was this era where hospitals thought that EMRs should be their IP that they develop and have a competitive advantage over other hospitals because their EMR was better. I don’t know what the thinking was, but people wanted to own their own EMRs. I think there may even have been some pipe dreams of like, oh, we’re going to commercialize this and sell it to other hospitals. It seems like not a core competency that hospitals should be doing. Anyway, within the Kaiser system, though, there was a fairly high degree of rotatable of physicians, of doctors. If you were a doctor in Portland with Kaiser Pacific Northwest, and you wanted to move or your family had to move down to California, you could transfer pretty easily to Northern or Southern California Kaiser. This was happening, and as physicians from the Northwest started coming down to California, they’d feel like, man, what are you guys doing? You’re spending all this money with Accenture and blah-blah-blah, all these consultants to try to roll your own. We’ve got this thing called Epic up in Portland that we’re not even using at the hospital, and it’s way better than the stuff that you’re trying to build. Finally after a year or two of this battle between North and South, they finally agree. All right, ceasefire. Let’s come to a truce. We’re going to ditch our competing projects and we’re going to bid this out to third-party vendors. They hold an RFP for a new EMR, for all of Kaiser, one integrated system, and they pick IBM. IBM’s going to come in and do this big $4 billion project for Kaiser. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM. We’re at the end of that era, but it’s still a little that era.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.