Kaiser Permanente may face the most serious public relations problem it has seen since the low point of the HMO era. The Los Angeles Times continues its series on the company's bungled effort to create a kidney transplant center in San Francisco. The paper reports that Kaiser never told the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the organization responsible for oversight of the transplant system, of its plan to transfer 1,500 patients from UC Davis and UCSF, which had been contracted to handle the HMO's cases. That apparently was emblematic of the administrative disorganization at the program. The paper reports that people who had been on the waiting list for transplants for years lost their place in line when the changeover went through. Kaiser announced last night that it is launching an internal investigation into the matter.

The Times talked to UNOS spokesman Joel Newman who sounded a bit mystified by the whole thing. "Normally when...transfers are addressed, we handle them in onesies and twosies, as they come up."

- see this article from the Los Angeles Times