Do Businesses Court Chicken Little?

I noticed on NPR's Morning Edition a story about a mandate in San Francisco to have companies provide paid sick days to employees. One thing that struck me is that one employer after another mentioned how people took far less sick time than they had imagined, and how the cost was far less than what they feared it might be. Some admitted that they had overreacted.

This sounded like the type of behavior the business community accuses environmentalists, shareholder activists, and others of demonstrating. The truth is that hysteria, bolstered by a willingness to stretch facts to support an argument, is all too human a trait. When people give in to it, they actually only support their cause, at best, by inflaming their existing supporters. But through continued exposure to the technique, the people and entities only create fatigue. At worst, they lose the true believers and antagonize their opponents.

Perhaps businesspeople would be better off by not assuming that every civic requirement was going to bury them in rubble, and instead work to admit any real need and then negotiate to find a way to implement changes. For example, when faced with a public that wants to mandate paid sick time - and, I think, with some justifiable desire - then why not work on a trial period. Six months should show beginnings of trends and allow the community and industry to assess the impact of a program and then make decisions based on fact, not fear.

Kaiser Permanente and Messy Electronic Patient Records

The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story the other day about Kaiser Permanente and how a 22-year-old turned the company's $4 billion electronic medical record (EMR) project into a public freeway pile-up by sending a company-wide email challenging the effectiveness of the project and whether the CIO had conflicts of interest. While CEO George Halvorson - whom I interviewed a few years ago on the topic of EMR - answered in another email the next work day essentially dismissing Justin Deal's analysis, the company's CIO resigned earlier the same day without a public explanation. Not long after this incident, Computerworld (disclosure - I used to contribute to the publication in years past) had its own reporting based on a leaked 722-page internal document that corroborated many of Mr. Deal's complaints about the system, called HealthConnect by the company.

Ironically, Mr. Deal first sent his complaints to Kaiser's compliance officer and to the board of directors:

Kaiser's assistant general counsel sent Mr. Deal a letter saying that "a thorough investigation" found no evidence of misconduct by the executives, nor of a "disastrous failure" of the HealthConnect project.

And yet there was this internal report. In either case it's clear that the board has some problems. Either it knew of the system issues and ignored them - which would seem like criminal negligance if patient health was affected - or it was incapable of unearthing this report. In either case, this would seem a clear issue of board dysfunction.

Kaiser Permanente and Messy Electronic Patient Records

The Wall Street Journal ran a front page story the other day about Kaiser Permanente and how a 22-year-old turned the company's $4 billion electronic medical record (EMR) project into a public freeway pile-up by sending a company-wide email challenging the effectiveness of the project and whether the CIO had conflicts of interest. While CEO George Halvorson - whom I interviewed a few years ago on the topic of EMR - answered in another email the next work day essentially dismissing Justin Deal's analysis, the company's CIO resigned earlier the same day without a public explanation. Not long after this incident, Computerworld (disclosure - I used to contribute to the publication in years past) had its own reporting based on a leaked 722-page internal document that corroborated many of Mr. Deal's complaints about the system, called HealthConnect by the company.

Ironically, Mr. Deal first sent his complaints to Kaiser's compliance officer and to the board of directors:

Kaiser's assistant general counsel sent Mr. Deal a letter saying that "a thorough investigation" found no evidence of misconduct by the executives, nor of a "disastrous failure" of the HealthConnect project.

And yet there was this internal report. In either case it's clear that the board has some problems. Either it knew of the system issues and ignored them - which would seem like criminal negligance if patient health was affected - or it was incapable of