Disruptors

Computerworld - Is it fair to lump a whistleblower in with the people he blows the whistle on? No, and I was wrong to give that impression when I wrote recently about Kaiser Permanente’s problems with its multibillion-dollar electronic health records (EHR) system and the employee who raised a stink about it.

Readers pointed out that Justen Deal, the 25-year-old project super­visor who e-mailed a memo about those problems to 180,000 Kaiser Permanente employees, shouldn’t be classed with CEO George Halvorson and ex-CIO Cliff Dodd, who pushed the troubled system and now face a financial pit and questions of conflict of interest.

They’re right. The guy who spotlights the problem is disruptive — but not in the same way as the people who caused the problem.

And as Computerworld reporter Linda Rosencrance has learned, the EHR system, HealthConnect, is plenty disruptive on its own.

A Kaiser IT employee sent Rosencrance a 722-page internal Kaiser report confirming Deal’s claims that HealthConnect continues to have outages that frustrate users and, in some cases, compromise patient care.

Kaiser says Deal is not an IT staffer, just a guy who works on health education publications. But IT people familiar with HealthConnect say the problems Deal cites are real — and were predicted when the technology for HealthConnect was originally considered and rejected by Kaiser’s IT organization.

They also confirm that Halvorson and Dodd overrode that rejection and pushed through their technology choice for the system.

And no one disputes that within a week of Deal’s e-mail, the CIO was gone. Kaiser insists there’s no connection between the two events — despite the suspicious timing and the lack of any other explanation for the sudden departure.

In short, Deal isn’t a crank or technically naive. He’s a credible whistleblower throwing a spotlight on genuine problems.

So why did I line up tech-savvy CEO Halvorson, tight-with-the-boss CIO Dodd and whistleblower Deal together, suggesting that “these people have brought Kaiser what appear to be sweetheart deals, cover-ups and damaging publicity” and that “IT needs people with these qualities. Not these people, maybe, and certainly not these results”?

If you’re a manager, you already know the answer.

Sweetheart deals, conflicts of interest, cover-ups — these create problems.

Whistleblowers create problems, too. In fairness, it’s a different sort of problem, arguably a good kind of problem. Sometimes it’s impossible to start cleaning up a mess until someone stands up and loudly declares that there is a mess. Without that first step, the mess will remain.

But the result is still disruptive. It shakes everything up, sucks up time and attention, distracts us from the productive work we need to do.