Hi KF,

Thank you for your comment. 

I understand how, just looking at the agenda, how you might think that the conference was just an organized effort to squash the blogger that challenges the practice of a company or a provider.  However, the conference really focused on getting companies into conversation with bloggers that love them and bloggers that hate them. We actually spent a great deal of time talking about transparency and blogger relations.   Much of the audience engagement focused on how to engage in the discussion in the blogosphere.  Afterall, there are at least two sides to every story and how can positive change occur without an honest and genuine effort to hear and respond to customer needs/concerns/issues/ viewpoints/complaints.

Take for example, the criticism this summer of JupiterResearch by Diva Marketing and HealthcareVox.  Both of these bloggers (who were panelists at the conference) highly and strongly criticized a study done by JR on corporate blogging.  This conversation went on for weeks in the blogosphere without a company response and got quite heated.  After all was said and done, this conversation actually resulted in JR changing their business practices about engaging bloggers and discussing the research methodology of the research they conduct. This model for the role of blogging was used to highlight the potential (and real-time) role of bloggers in the healthcare industry.

In closing, I'm sorry that you were unable to attend the conference.  I think you would have found it to be a candid conversation of how blogging is changing the face of healthcare organizations.  Now more than ever, the consumer/patient/customer has a voice and some power in the delivery of services.  It really isn't about squelching the  "complainer" or "trouble maker" as it is about engaging in the conversation, understanding the consumer perspective, becoming a transparent organization and working toward constantly improving the quality of care in responsible  and thoughtful ways.

Carol D. Kirshner, MS

www.drivingintraffic.com

www.psychiatricresourceforum.blogs.com

Hi, Hippocrates -

Thank you for responding. I'm heartened that you tried to invite a whistleblower, and I didn't mean to be pushing myself. Though I can't tell the future, it's unlikely I'll be able to travel to Las Vegas. I do appreciate the thought, though.

There's one thing Kaiser could have been doing all along: their grievance procedure is completely broken - for both Exempt and Union employees. It's geared only to create delays and reduce the chances that the employee will pursue legal recourse. Furthermore, Kaiser currently condones, perhaps encourages, destruction of evidence in these cases. Under these circumstances, managers have free reign with retaliation, so of course employees facing whistleblower situations are going to have distorted reactions and do unpredictable things.

Kaiser needs to fix this procedure so it's fair, and so it protects employees from retaliation. Employees need to get a fair hearing, with their own advocates and a guarantee of preservation of evidence. Managers caught destroying or fabricating evidence need to be addressed with strong sanctions that will show the entire organization that retaliation is not tolerated, and people will not be punished for acting on integrity, defending the public good, or complying with the law.

In many cases, including mine, Kaiser compounded the original wrongdoing with further misdeeds in the attempt to shut me up and make an example out of me. This clearly backfired: Kaiser put me in a position where I had no choice but to defend myself publicly, and they gave me strong motivation to help others in a similar situation. Doing the right thing by me early on would have cost Kaiser relatively little: now it would be impossible for Kaiser to ever fix what they've done. Both employees and patients tend to feel this way after going through Kaiser's "arbitration" processes because they are at a severe resource disadvantage, and if Kaiser decides to just lie their way out of it, there's very little a person can do.

Therefore Kaiser has been creating a trail of human wreckage, with many, many people feeling angry and helpless because they have no power to make things right. As much as doctors like to whine about tort reform, they are the ones who wait for the people they've wronged to get a lawyer and force them to do the right thing. If a person doesn't have any money or influence, Kaiser assumes they don't matter, and they just sponsor a nursing scholarship or something to divert any negative PR.

If Kaiser doesn't want to face hundreds of aggrieved people looking for alternative ways to get justice, then they need to actively institute their own culture of workplace fairness. They need to audit HR and Compliance encounters just as they do health care encounters. They need to acknowledge some employees are more weak and vulnerable than others, and these people need some protection and advocacy just so they can have the ability to prove their case.

One thing Kaiser's Issues Management consultants don't understand is that people don't fight back just because they've been laid off, disappointed in a promotion, or irritated by some tiff with a manager. Employees fight back when the situation is horrifically unfair - when the wrong is of such a scale that it threatens any faith they have in justice in the universe. People may say they want money or power, but what they really want most in the universe is to be able to maintain their integrity and to be able to trust the people who have power over them. One of the worst things a person in a superior position can do is wallpaper over reality with some other story - and at Kaiser this happens all the time. When this happens, people leave angry and it's almost a guarantee that they will eventually find a way to push back. If I were in charge of Kaiser, I'd have the wisdom to make sure not to leave people in this condition.