Fasano replaced interim CIO Bruce Turksta, who was named to the post after the resignation of CIO Cliff Dodd. Dodd in November, just days after Justen Deal, a Kaiser Permanente employee, sent a memo to every Kaiser worker warning of technological and financial repercussions related to the rollout of a US$4 billion electronic health records management system from Epic Systems Corp.

Kaiser officials said at the time that Dodd's resignation was unrelated to Deal's e-mail.

In November, Computerworld that there were major problems with an electronic health system being rolled out by Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals. The information was based on a 722-page internal report and IT sources at Kaiser.

On Jan. 3, the California Department of Managed Health Care submitted a number of questions to Kaiser Permanente regarding stories that had appeared in the media about KP HealthConnect, Kaiser's electronic health records management system, on the general topic of system outages, said Kaiser spokesman Matthew Schiffgens in a e-mail to Computerworld.

"We responded to all of the agency's questions on Jan. 25, 2007, and we will continue to work with them should they have additional inquiries," he said.