The Gadlfy gets some good press in a Bay Area blog called SFist which notes her side of the story and not Kaisers. The story is called David Versus Goliath — And Goliath’s Bigger Brothers, Backed By The Persian Army –to give you an idea of where it’s coming from. They also credit THCB for fair and balanced coverage, and frankly I think I’m the only one calling for reason and moderation in this whole thing.

But what’s been the damage to a great non-profit health care institution?  Perhaps nothing, but now rightly or wrongly they’ve been castigated as a bad employer, they’ve had their proprietary data on the Health Connect program up for all their competitors and potentially hackers to see, and worse they’ve had to admit in court to a patient privacy violation that they waited at least 5 months and maybe much longer to reveal to the  patients concerned. And this says nothing about trying to rather brazenly blame the whole thing on the Gadfly — not that she’s blameless, but she couldn’t have done this without their sloppiness.

Kaiser should be getting great kudos for its roles in promoting IT in health care and running disease management programs. But instead what happens if you do a Google news search about KP? You get basically a page of stories about this incident?  And it could all have been avoided with a decent handling by middle management and HR of the exit of the Gadfly, which included a small settlement and a no-sue confidentiality agreement. Dumb, dumb, dumb.