Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yes. I don’t know if it was just Northwest or they had maybe some other smaller regional operations at the time, but they had a Pacific Northwest, small region based in Portland, Oregon. Today actually, Kaiser has large regions through a large part of the country. They’ve grown a lot since then. But in this small little Portland region, they had started using Epic for their ambulatory clinics, so like not even inpatient stuff in the hospital, but their outpatient clinics. And at the time the northern California and Southern California big factions were battling each other. They’re each trying to develop their own proprietary EMR systems with software consultants, with Accenture and stuff. 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.…

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