integrated delivery system – The Health Care Blog

The Kaiser Permanente Model and Health Reform’s Unfinished Business

Oct 1, 2014• 20

By JEFF GOLDSMITH

For decades, health policymakers considered Kaiser Permanente the lode star of delivery system reform. Yet by the end of 1999, the nation’s oldest and largest group model HMO had experienced almost three years of significant operating losses, the first in the plan’s history. It was struggling to implement a functional electronic health record, and had a reputation for inconsistent customer service. But most seriously, it faced deep divisions between management and the leadership of its powerful Permanente Federation, which represents Kaiser’s more than 17,000 physicians, over both strategic direction and operations of the plan.

Against this backdrop, Kaiser surprised the health plan community by announcing in March 2002 the selection of a non-physician, George Halvorson, as its new CEO. Halvorson had spent most of his career in the Twin Cities, most recently as CEO of HealthPartners, a successful mixed model health plan. Halvorson’s reputation was as a product innovator; he not only developed a prototype of the consumer-directed health plan in the mid-1990’s, but also population health improvement objectives for its membership, both firsts in the industry.

Why Can’t the ICU Be More Like a Cockpit?

Feb 23, 2012• 17

By Peter Pronovost, MD

In the world of patient safety, we’re constantly reinforcing the importance of teamwork and communication, both among clinicians and with patients. That’s because we know that patient harm so often occurs when vital information about a patient’s care is omitted, miscommunicated or ignored.

Yet for all we do to improve how humans work together, clinicians compete against an environment in which there is very little teamwork or communication among the technologies that they need to care for patients. And there’s little that clinicians or hospitals alone can do about it.

Take, for example, the plethora of alarms from cardiac monitors and other devices that compete for clinicians’ attention. Vendors act as if we are in an alarm race, with each making their devices’ beeps more annoying but no clear prioritizing of the most important alarms. A study on one 15-bed Hopkins Hospital unit a few years ago found that a critical alarm sounded every 92 seconds. As a result, nurses waste their precious time chasing an ever-growing number of false alarms—or becoming desensitized to false alarms and ignoring them. Across the country, this has had tragic consequences, as patients have died while their alarms went unheeded. (Read a 2011 Boston Globe series about this issue.)

In most other high-risk industries, such as aviation and nuclear power, technologies are integrated. They talk to each other, and they automatically adjust based on feedback. Indeed, because of systems integration, pilots fly a small amount of a flight, and even in some treacherous situations, they hand over the reins to the autopilot. Although Southwest Airlines or the U.S. Air Force can buy a working plane, you cannot buy a working hospital or ICU. You must put it together yourself.

There are many other examples of how health care is grossly under-engineered. Consider these:

The opposite of that bridge to nowhere

Aug 21, 2009• 26

By MICHAEL PAINTER MPainter

An elderly family member recently received a devastating cancer diagnosis. She gets her care in California from a team of health professionals in a large integrated delivery system. We’re supposed to be reassured that her care team is working together in seamless accountability–dedicated solely to the best possible outcomes for her, right? Unfortunately, that’s not entirely the case. She, of course, has a primary physician and a surgeon. She had a hospitalist who managed her inpatient post-operative complications. She has a number of oncologists. Guess what? None of these five or six physicians were communicating with each other about her care until family members prompted them to do so. She didn’t really have much, if any, choice in selecting her specialists. She had minimal, if any, information about the performance of the various professionals she suddenly needed.