Partnership Highlighted in Harvard Business Review
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This is a crosspost from by John August, Executive Director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.
The July-August, 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review is devoted to the study of collaboration, and a lead article in the issue, “Building a Collaborative Enterprise,” by Paul Adler, Charles Heckscher and Laurence Prusak, cites the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership as an important example of how collaboration works successfully.
Professor Paul Adler, of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, is well known to us in the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, the Partnership and Kaiser Permanente. He co-authored the definitive book (thus far) on the history of the LMP, Healing Together. More recently, he worked with the Union Coalition to help develop our new learning academy for union leaders.
Kaiser Model Shows the Way to Improving Health Care Delivery
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Using a combination of integrated, team-based care and technology, Kaiser Permanente of Southern California developed a Healthy Bones initiative that not only reduced fractures in the most at-risk patients by 37 percent, but lowered the care cost for the same patients by 30 percent.
Similar Kaiser programs have reduced heart disease deaths and treatment costs in Colorado and diabetes complications and costs in Hawaii.
Yesterday, a forum hosted by the National Labor College (NLC) and the Kaiser Permanente Health Care Institute explored how health care delivery and quality can be vastly improved and costs significantly lowered with integrated care and technology and by maximizing the unique labor-management partnership at Kaiser Permanente, where some 96,000 health care workers are unionized.
With the nation in the midst of a debate over how to reform the nation’s broken health care system and how to expand and improve care and reduce costs, the Kaiser model provides a promising blueprint.
