I don't have enough data to make a judgement whether or not Kaiser Permanente did anything wrong, but their response tactics are worth study.
The setup:
Critical Case: How an Email Rant Jolted a Big HMO - WSJ.com :
On a Friday morning last November, Justen Deal, a 22-year-old Kaiser Permanente employee here, blasted an email throughout the giant health maintenance organization. His message charged that HealthConnect -- the company's ambitious $4 billion project to convert paper files into electronic medical records -- was a mess.
In a blistering 2,000-word treatise, Mr. Deal wrote: “We're spending recklessly, to the tune of over $1.5 billion in waste every year, primarily on HealthConnect, but also on other inefficient and ineffective information technology projects.” He did not stop there. Mr. Deal cited what he called the “misleadership” of Kaiser Chief Executive George Halvorson and other top managers, who he said were jeopardizing the company's ability to provide quality care.
“For me, this isn't just an issue of saving money,” he wrote. “It could very well become an issue of making sure our physicians and nurses have the tools they need to save lives.”
...
Earlier during the day, Kaiser had announced that J. Clifford Dodd, its chief information officer, resigned. The HMO said the timing was a coincidence and gave no reason for the executive's departure. Attempts to reach Mr. Dodd for comment were unsuccessful.Mr. Deal, meanwhile, quickly became a cause celebre in the blogosphere and beyond. HIStalk, a popular health-care IT site, featured “an exclusive interview,” with Mr. Deal. One stock analyst says that Kaiser's tribulations could alter the competitive landscape for IT vendors.
Soon after the email leak, ComputerWorld magazine ran a negative story about HealthConnect, based on a 722-page internal Kaiser document chronicling various problems with the system including power outages, system failures and incomplete patient records.
The corporate response included:
After the message hit, Kaiser sprang into action to assess the damage and figure out a response. Since the missive was sent on a Friday, it went unread by many employees who had left for the weekend. Kaiser's IT staff scrambled to delete it before workers returned to their desks -- but with little success. By Monday, the mass mailing had reached an estimated 120,000 computers at the company. It had also leaked into cyberspace.
...
Andrew Wiesenthal, a physician overseeing the HealthConnect project, became worried about the buzz Mr. Deal was generating. In a counterpunch, he offered an interview to Matthew Holt, a well-known health-care blogger. A few days later, Mr. Wiesenthal joined a podcast using his cellphone in the backseat of a taxi. Of the email, he said, “Most of the things he raises are not true.”Kaiser officials unleashed other communications tactics. To disseminate its side of the story on the Web, the company paid Google to place a special Kaiser link at the top of any page returning search results for “Justen Deal.”
In February, Kaiser launched its “KP News Center,” linked to the company's home page. When the Los Angeles Times ran a critical HealthConnect story that echoed some of Mr. Deal's criticisms, the site posted Kaiser's official response.
Interesting, we'll see if Kaiser is still paying for google ads. I wonder what the ad will link to?
Sibel Edwards should have been as pro-active as Justen Deal was: perhaps her story would have resonated more with the chattering class.
Technorati Tags: PR, surveillance
