Getting to Know Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect's Rose Calhan
Rose Calhan is program director for Northern California Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect
Rose Calhan is program director for northern California Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect, an electronic medical-record system that integrates Kaiser Permanente's clinical and business systems, and, within the next few years, will provide physicians and other health care providers at Kaiser Permanente facilities across the nation with real-time, secure, electronic access to members' clinical information. Not only is it the largest system installation project in Kaiser Permanente history, it is the largest private deployment of an electronic health record system in the world.
How do you keep yourself from becoming overwhelmed by such an enormous task?
You start with a good plan and take it one step at a time. I tell our teams, 'Absorb what you can. Give yourself permission to learn. There isn't one person here who knows everything.' You have to rely on groups of people. It's a good training ground for working with teams.
What did you do before Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect?
I was director of hospital operations at Kaiser Permanente's San Rafael Medical Center. I started in health care as a nurse anesthetist in Germany before I met my first husband and came to San Francisco. I knew I would have to go through a lot of retraining to continue so I thought instead I'd go into the operating room. I started as an OR nurse, then became director of surgery, then a service line administrator. I managed surgery departments, emergency departments, cardiac catheterization labs, nursing units, and GI labs, and served as a nurse executive. I've held many different administrative roles (for many years at Catholic Healthcare West.) My strength is really operations in health care.
What do you enjoy most about your job?
I love that Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect is such a great project. It can do so much for the organization. It has the potential to make things so much easier for physicians and clinicians and other care givers. And we haven't even begun to explore the value of having the kind of aggregate health care data it will make available to us.
What's home life like?
My husband and I are 'empty nesters.' We have a dog and an African grey parrot. They've replaced the children. The parrot talks in my husband's voice. He says, 'Hello, I'm home,' when my husband comes in the door. He calls the dog. He says, 'Come here Sophie,' and tells her, 'Go outside!' He doesn't realize that Sophie died and we have a new dog, Sadie. I'm a total Raiders fan. We like to travel, and I return to Heidelberg, Germany often to see my family and friends. Every other year my family meets somewhere for a vacation. We've been on a Mediterranean cruise and one year we met in Turkey.
You're a graduate of Kaiser Permanente's five week Advanced Leadership Program (ALP). Anything in particular resonate with you?
The idea of managing to people's strengths. I did that in my own way intuitively but hearing it validated it for me.
What are you currently most proud of professionally?
Putting together a team of clinicians and IT professionals to design and deploy the system. You need representation from physicians, nurses, and other clinicians who offer their unique perspective to the project. Without that blended experience and approach it's not going to be a good system.
Are you a tech-savvy person?
On a scale of one to 10, I'd put myself at a 5.5. My 27 year old son keeps me very much updated. Right now everything is on my cell phone. I can send e-mails and I'm completely off a paper calendar.