Kaiser Permanente is proud to partner with Smart Business to present the 2011 
Innovation in Business awards. We’re honored to help recognize the region’s most forward-thinking organizations and the visionary people who lead Northeast Ohio forward.
Kaiser Permanente has a strong history of innovation. The health plan evolved from the industrial health care programs for the workers of Henry Kaiser’s companies during the 1930s and 1940s and was opened to public enrollment in 1945. The innovations Kaiser Permanente brought to U.S. health care include:
- Physician group practices
- A focus on prevention
- An integrated care delivery system
As this year’s honorees know, innovative organizations don’t sit still. Kaiser Permanente’s founding physician, Dr. Sidney Garfield, recognized the potential of health information technology in the early 1960s, but very limited options existed at the time.
Over the last several years, Kaiser Permanente implemented its comprehensive health information system, Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect. KP HealthConnect is now being used nationwide in Kaiser Permanente’s 454 medical offices and 36 hospitals.
KP HealthConnect is the largest civilian electronic health record system in the world. It gives our organization advantages no one else can duplicate.
- Physicians, specialists, nurses, pharmacists, lab techs, radiology techs and more are all connected to each other and to the 8.8 million members they care for in real time. In 2010, Kaiser Permanente members sent nearly 11 million e-mails to their physicians and viewed nearly 26 million test results online.
- The number and diversity of health records in KP HealthConnect enable unprecedented research opportunities that were never possible before.
- Built-in treatment guidelines help improve the management of chronic conditions and reduce health care disparities. According to the Institute of Medicine, it takes an average of 17 years before a new best care practice becomes the standard for even 50 percent of specialists in a given area. In Kaiser Permanente’s integrated delivery system, we can go from cutting-edge knowledge to implementation in just one year, as noted in “Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century,” a Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute presentation delivered at the Institute for Healthcare conference in 2005.
Organizations that don’t stay true to their reasons for existence — their customers and their core business model — disappear. Those that don’t innovate also disappear. The key is to be true to who you are as an organization and simultaneously innovate. We salute this year’s honorees and congratulate them on their ability to balance both aspirations so beautifully.
Joe LaGuardia is vice president of marketing, sales and business development at Kaiser Permanente. Reach him at (216) 479-5547 or [email protected].
