Rick Nelson

Don’t try this at work!
April 24, 2007

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an account of an e-mail contretemps whose effects on the protagonists even Prozac is unlikely to alleviate. “Justen Deal, a 22-year-old Kaiser Permanente employee here, blasted an e-mail 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.”

Kaiser Permanente officials were less than pleased, if not clinically depressed. IT personnel unsuccessfully tried to delete the Deal’s mass mailing, sent on a Friday afternoon, before employees could read it Monday morning. Kaiser Permanente chief executive George Halvorson followed up with a defensive mass e-mail of his own (click here and scroll down; subscription required) in an effort to refute Deal’s claims. Deal was fired (or placed on unpaid administrative leave, if there is a difference), and Kaiser Permanente’s CIO resigned, although the company attributed neither of these actions directly to Deal’s e-mail blast and its aftermath.

Interestingly, Deal’s mass mailing wasn’t a rash, spur of the moment action. His message is a carefully edited 2000-word indictment alleging conflict of interest among Kaiser Permanente officials and outside organizations as well as mismanagement of the document-conversion program. His decision to blast the message to all employees required advance planning as well. Lacking a “send all” function, he “says he bought a cheap software tool that helped him gradually build a list on his own computer,” according to the Journal article.

Deal is still continuing his battle on his own Website.

Posted by Rick Nelson on April 24, 2007 | Comments (0)