New Kaiser IT head charts change of course

After months of being in a holding pattern, Kaiser Permanente has hired a new, permanent top technology leader to stabilize its troubled IT organization.

Philip Fasano, former CEO of Capital Sourcing Group, is now vice president and chief information officer. He takes over from Bruce Turkstra, who served as interim IT chief after Cliff Dodd resigned in November. Dodd left practically overnight [1]after a junior employee, Justen Deal, sent an email to Kaiser employees detailing serious uptime problems with its EMR. Since Deal's letter, the California Department of Managed Health Care began investigating [2] problems with Kaiser's $4 billion Epic installation.

Fasano, who comes from the financial services industry, has vowed to bring Kaiser's HealthConnect EMR the "five nines" uptime enjoyed by users of financial information networks. To do so, he's planning to decentralize, giving a group of regional "business information managers" the ability to exercise more control over local IT problems. He's also planning to shift thousands of IT employees over to helping internal customers like physicians. In the past, most IT staffers were focused on maintaining standard IT services. In addition, he hopes to spend $100 million to $200 million on infrastructure investment, on top of his $1.6 billion overall IT budget.

To find out more about Fasano:
- read this East Bay Business Times article [3]

Related articles:
Read Justen Deal's opinion on K-P's new hire. Blog [4]
Controversy topples top IT exec. Article [5]