Tag: Kaiser Permanente

GoodWill’s Lessons for Health Care

Oct 18, 2023

By KIM BELLARD

The New York Times had an interesting profile this weekend about how Goodwill Industries is trying to revamp its online presence – transitioning from its legacy ShopGoodwill.com to a new platform GoodwillFinds — in the amidst of numerous other online resellers. It zeroed in on the key distinction Goodwill has:

But Goodwill isn’t doing this just because it wants to move into the 21st century. More than 130,000 people work across the organization, while two million people received assistance last year through its programs, which include career navigation and skills training. Those opportunities are funded through the sales of donated items.

Moreover, the article continued: “Last year, Goodwill helped nearly 180,000 people through its job services.”

In case you weren’t aware, Goodwill has long had a mission of hiring people who otherwise face barriers to employment, such as veterans, those who lack job experience or educational qualifications, or have handicaps. As it says in its mission statement, it “works to enhance the dignity and quality of life of individuals and families by strengthening communities, eliminating barriers to opportunity, and helping people in need reach their full potential through learning and the power of work.”

As PYMNTS wrote earlier this month: “Every purchase made through GoodwillFinds initiates a chain reaction, providing job training, resume assistance, financial education, and essential services to individuals in need within the community where the item was contributed.”

I want healthcare to have that kind of commitment to patients.

Healthcare claims to be all about patients. You won’t find many that openly talk about profits or return on equity. Reading mission statements of healthcare organizations yield the kinds of pronouncements one might expect. A not-entirely random sample:

Cleveland Clinic: “to be the best place for care anywhere and the best place to work in healthcare.”

What the Pandemic Taught Us About Value-based Care

Feb 17, 2022• 4

By RICHARD ISAACS

You’ll recall that we ran a long piece (pt 1, pt 2) about Medicare Advantage from former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson earlier this year. Here’s a somewhat related piece from the current head of The Permanente Medical Group about what actually happened there and elsewhere during the pandemic–Matthew Holt

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided important lessons regarding the structure and delivery of health care in the United States, and one of the most significant takeaways has been the need to shift to value-based models of care.

The urgency for this transformation was clear from the pandemic’s earliest days, as shelter-in-place orders caused patient visits to brick-and-mortar facilities to plummet. That decline dealt a financial blow to many fee-for-service health care providers, who are paid per patient visit, treatment or test performed — regardless of the patient’s health outcome.

Prepaid, value-based health care systems, on the other hand, have demonstrated that they are better equipped to respond to a continually evolving health care landscape. Because they are integrated, with a focus on seamless care coordination, and they are accountable for both the quality of care and cost, these systems can leverage technologies in different ways to rapidly adapt to major disruptions and other market dynamics. Priorities are in the right place: the patient’s best interests. Value is generated by delivering the right level of care, in the right setting, at the right time.

Because value-based care focuses on avoiding chronic disease and helping patients recover from illnesses and injuries more quickly, it has the promise to significantly reduce overall costs in the United States, where nearly 18% of gross domestic product was spent on health care before the pandemic — significantly more than comparable countries. That figure rose to nearly 20% in 2020 during the pandemic.

While providers may need to spend more time on implementing new, prevention-based services and technologies, they will spend less time on managing chronic diseases. And thanks to the preventive approach of value-based health care organizations, society benefits because less money is spent managing chronic diseases, costly hospitalizations and medical emergencies.

Value-based organizations drive additional societal benefits. They understand that building trust with patients requires cultural competency — tailoring services to an individual’s cultural and language preferences. During the pandemic, building trust was especially important with underserved communities, where mistrust of health care systems is prevalent.

DAOs May Rescue Healthcare

Jan 19, 2022

By KIM BELLARD

You may have seen the news that Kaiser Permanente has signed on to be an organizing member of Graphite Health, joining SSM Health, Presbyterian Healthcare Services, and Intermountain Healthcare. Graphite Health, in case you missed its October launch announcement, is “a member-led company intent on transforming digital health care to improve patient outcomes and lower costs,” focusing on health care interoperability.

That’s all very encouraging, but I’m wondering why it isn’t a DAO. In fact, I’m wondering why there aren’t more DAOs in healthcare generally.

#Healthin2Point00, Episode 208 | Cedar acquires Ooda & funding for Medically Home, Huma

May 14, 2021

Today Jess is bored with consistent $100m+ deals and yawns in the face of the Tiger! No matter– I explain what Cedar acquiring Ooda for $425m means, why $100m for Medically Home is a departure for Mayo but not Kaiser, and what the heck Huma is all about (OK, I don’t really know). Does Jess get more interested by the end? You’ll have to watch to find out!–Matthew Holt

Leadership During a Healthcare Crisis: Kaiser Permanente’s Response to COVID-19

Apr 14, 2020

A Conversation with Dr. Richard Isaacs, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group and the Mid Atlantic Permanente Medical Group

By AJAY KOHLI, MD

Organizations aren’t built in crises. Their mettle, their history and their leadership define how organizations adapt and succeed, particularly in difficult times. Of the three, the most important quality is leadership. In this regard, Kaiser Permanente is leading the way in healthcare delivery.

I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Richard Isaacs, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group and The MidAtlantic Permanente Medical Group, to discuss the strategic vision and granular details of Kaiser Permanente’s response to the global pandemic of COVID-19.

Kaiser Permanente has a strong foundation in the history of delivering care to the vulnerable. Founded in 1945 by a surgeon, Dr. Sidney Garfield, and an industrialist, Henry J. Kaiser, the organization grew from a single hospital in Oakland, California into one of the largest physician-led organizations in the world. Currently, it boasts more than 22,000 physicians responsible for the care of more than 12.5 million lives.

Many question how large healthcare organizations, like Kaiser Permanente, can adapt to a rapidly evolving problem, like the global pandemic of COVID-19, especially when cities and even countries are struggling under the burden.

THCB Spotlights: Jeremy Orr, CEO of Medial EarlySign

Nov 26, 2019

Today on THCB Spotlights, Matthew speaks with Jeremy Orr, CEO of Medial EarlySign. Medial EarlySign does complex algorithmic detection of elevated risk trajectories for high-burden serious diseases, and the progression towards chronic diseases such as diabetes. Tune in to hear more about this AI/ML company that has been working on their algorithms since before many had even heard about machine learning, what they’ve been doing with Kaiser Permanente and Geisinger, and where they are going next.

Filmed at the HLTH Conference in Las Vegas, October 2019.

Health in 2 Point 00, Episode 79 | Noom, DispatchHealth and Kaiser Permanente

May 10, 2019

Today on Health in 2 Point 00, Jess is in Italy…and has me up far too early in the morning for this episode. On Episode 79, Jess asks me for an update on uBiome after their raid by the FBI. We also talk about nutrition startup Noom’s $58 million raise and clinician house-call platform DispatchHealth’s $33 million raise. In other news, Kaiser Permanente is launching a network to integrate the social determinants of health with their EHR. –Matthew Holt

The Disruptive Potential of Employer-Centered Care

Dec 11, 2018• 7

Lawrence Leisure talking about Centered Care

By LAWRENCE LEISURE

When it comes to health care prices, the burden piled on payers can seem almost cartoonishly heavy. News stories on the state of the industry read as though some satirist decided to exaggerate real systemic flaws into cost-prohibitive fiction. A particularly painful example hit the presses earlier this year, when a writer for Reuters revealed that the cost of a full course of oncology treatment skyrocketed from $30,447 in 2006 to $161,141 in the last few years. The change was so unbelievable as to verge on dark comedy — but there isn’t much to find funny in the situation when lives and health outcomes are on the line.

For the average employee in my home of Silicon Valley, the price crunch is challenging regardless the size of your paycheck. For local employers, however, the dilemma can be even more pointed. Today, employees of companies, large and small, expect their employer to provide comprehensive health care benefits and are largely unaware of or insensitive to the factors exacerbating market problems today. Providing these benefits, however, is easier said than done.

Employers and insurers alike face a multitude of barriers to connecting employees with affordable care. Recent research suggests that prices will increase at an average clip of 5.8% annually between now and 2024, well above the expected rate of inflation. Even worse, the increased consolidation of healthcare providers has drastically undermined the negotiating power that payers would otherwise have in more competitive markets. In Northern California, for example, major health systems, including Sutter Health, sparked outrage and protest as they have managed to amass enough of the region’s hospitals, outpatient facilities, and primary care offices to diminish regional competitors and set what many view as unacceptably high rates — all the while knowing that the lack of local competition makes it challenging for the major health insurers to push back.

Integrating in Health Care: 6 Tools for Working Across Boundaries

Dec 4, 2018• 4

By REBECCA FOGG

Today’s health care providers face the formidable challenge of delivering better, more affordable and more convenient care in the face of spiraling care costs and an epidemic of chronic disease. But the most innovative among them are making encouraging progress by “integrating”—which in this context means working across traditional boundaries between patients and clinicians, health care specialties, care sites and sectors.

The impulse to do so is shrewd, according to our innovation research in sectors from computer manufacturing to education. We’ve found that when a product isn’t yet good enough to address the needs of a particular customer segment, a company must control the entire product design and production process in order to improve it. This is necessary because in a “not-good-enough” product, unpredictable and complex interdependencies exist between components, so each component’s design depends on that of all the others.

Given this, managers responsible for the individual components must collaborate—or integrate—in order to align components’ design and assembly toward optimal performance. IBM employed an integrated strategy to improve performance of its early mainframe computers, and this enabled the firm to dominate the early computer industry when mainframes weren’t yet meeting customers’ needs.

In health care delivery, such integration is analogous to, but something more than, coordinated care. It means assembling and aligning resources and processes to deliver the right care, in the right place, at the right time. This type of integration is a core aspiration of innovative providers leading hot-spotting and aging-in-place programs, capitated primary care practices, initiatives addressing health-related social needs, and other care models that depart from America’s traditional, episodic, acute-care model. How are they tackling it? They’re leveraging very specific tools to facilitate work across boundaries. Here are six of the most common we uncovered in our research:

An Open Letter to Kaiser Permanente Northern California

Feb 13, 2017• 4

By RACHEL KATZ

I am writing this letter because for two months I tried to get ahold of Darryn Carter, a case manager at your company who was assigned to process a complaint I filed about care I received that I feel was harmful and irresponsible.

The legal and rational reason for this current writing is this: the letter I received from Darryn Carter rejecting my complaint claim stated that I have a legal right to see the documentation and evidence used to make the decision about my case. I would like to see that evidence file, and I have not been able to get in touch with Mr./ Ms. Carter or anyone else at Kaiser to send the file.

The emotional and human reason I want to talk with Darryn Carter–and I think it’s appropriate to share this reason too, given that you are a care provider–is that I believe I received bad care at Kaiser, and yet no one at Kaiser has ever listened to what I have to say about it, despite months of my trying to tell someone. My concern and frustration, which is so strong that it drove me to spend a Saturday writing this letter, is not primarily about the bad care I believe I received but rather the wholehearted dismissal that your organization has levied through an unnavigable bureaucracy. This dismissal has kept me up nights, sometimes crying, sometimes fuming, sometimes brooding, always feeling that special type of indignity reserved for a patient with a care provider who blatantly and systematically refuses to care.