Kaiser Permanente, every mention

Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired Apr 21, 2025 · 35 mentions

• ▶ 1:08:23 David Rosenthal Kaiser Permanente in California.
• ▶ 1:08:26 David Rosenthal But before we tell the Kaiser story, which completely transformed the company.
• ▶ 1:10:23 Ben Gilbert So David, Kaiser Permanente, the biggest of big fishes, comes knocking.
• ▶ 1:10:29 David Rosenthal So Kaiser Permanente is this fascinating organization that was started and is headquartered here in California.
• ▶ 1:10:41 David Rosenthal And so what that means is that essentially they are both your health plan, your insurance and your hospital system all in one.
• ▶ 1:11:08 David Rosenthal But importantly, they do also need to work with and interface with Medicare as they have their own Medicare Advantage plan, and so for their older patients, customers, once they get older, they transition to Medicare Advantage through…
• ▶ 1:11:22 David Rosenthal Now at the time, here we're in 2003, Kaiser was the largest single hospital system in the entire country.
• ▶ 1:11:31 David Rosenthal 400 plus clinics, 11,000 physicians, and eight and a half million patients that are part of Kaiser here in 2003.
• ▶ 1:11:40 David Rosenthal And they decide that they are gonna put out an RFP for a whole new, integrated, entire Kaiser system-wide EMR system.
• ▶ 1:13:10 David Rosenthal For all of Kaiser.
• ▶ 1:13:19 David Rosenthal Yes, and after they signed Kaiser, they go to a hundred and sixty two million in annual revenue.
• ▶ 1:15:04 Ben Gilbert If Kaiser is gonna engage in switching their central nervous system over several years, it's going to be net four billion dollars of impact to them.
• ▶ 1:15:18 David Rosenthal At the time, Kaiser's two main centers of gravity were Northern California and Southern California, and they were almost like separate companies under the Kaiser umbrella.
• ▶ 1:15:55 David Rosenthal Today, actually, Kaiser has large regions through a large part of the country.
• ▶ 1:17:00 David Rosenthal So 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.
• ▶ 1:17:50 David Rosenthal So they hold an RFP for a new EMR for all of Kaiser, one integrated system, and they pick IBM.
• ▶ 1:18:03 David Rosenthal For Kaiser.
• ▶ 1:20:27 David Rosenthal So, okay, Kaiser's now got to rebid this project, and by this point in time, enough Portland doctors had come down to California and sung Epic's praises that they're like, alright, we should take this little company seriously.
• ▶ 1:21:57 David Rosenthal The obvious choice for Kaiser here in 2003 would have been go with Cerner.
• ▶ 1:23:33 David Rosenthal So, they go a little further in the process, and at one point, there's a technical due diligence meeting where Kaiser asks both companies to come in and present to them about how their systems are going to handle all the volume of…
• ▶ 1:25:05 David Rosenthal We need to model out in Excel exactly what Kaiser's transaction flow is gonna be throughout the day in the system and how our system will process it and prove to them that we have far in excess bandwidth capability to handle their system…
• ▶ 1:25:47 David Rosenthal Come in, and they show the model during these meetings that Kaiser is having back and forth between the two teams, and as the day is going on, it becomes really clear that
• ▶ 1:25:57 David Rosenthal Cerner has not done a similar level of modeling and can't actually prove to Kaiser that their system is gonna be able to handle the transaction flow.
• ▶ 1:26:13 Ben Gilbert I think they earned big points there, but my understanding is that Kaiser still went to Cerner and said, we're interested in
• ▶ 1:26:33 David Rosenthal The story, as we heard it at least, is that at the last minute, then right before the decision, yeah, Kaiser came to both companies and said, hey, we'd really like warrants in your company.
• ▶ 1:28:26 David Rosenthal The Kaiser Epic system could become the Model T of its industry.
• ▶ 1:28:41 David Rosenthal If you're a hospital system, if you're a CIO or a CEO looking to rebid your EMR, well, Kaiser, the biggest system in the world, just chose Epic, and they chose it
• ▶ 1:29:22 David Rosenthal Another three X what they were doing once they added Kaiser and like eight X what they were before Kaiser, almost 10 X what they were before Kaiser.
• ▶ 1:29:39 Ben Gilbert And this employee said, oh, after we won the Kaiser deal, we had been hiring like 10 kids a month out of college and it now felt like hundreds a month.
• ▶ 2:00:30 Ben Gilbert We've gotten to the Kaiser deal.
• ▶ 2:16:26 David Rosenthal Yeah, so imagine a huge system like Kaiser with 11,000 physicians.
• ▶ 2:28:26 David Rosenthal And to be clear, I think, especially after the Kaiser win,
• ▶ 2:39:37 David Rosenthal It ends up being a 4.3 billion dollar deal, so even bigger than the Kaiser deal.
• ▶ 2:39:55 David Rosenthal Bids on both of these contracts, and as you would expect, just like with Kaiser, it comes down to Epic and Cerner.
• ▶ 2:43:49 David Rosenthal Kind of like Kaiser was transformative for Epic back in the day.