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.
Technology Alone Can’t Deliver Better Health Care
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With the federal government poised to invest billions of dollars in health information technology as part of comprehensive health care reform, the AFL-CIO joined with Kaiser Permanente and the Alliance for Health Reform to show how the efficient use of new information systems and involvement of all caregivers—doctors, pharmacists, nurses and others—in health decisions can lead to better health care. In fact, Kaiser says its pilot program is using technology in new ways to cut cardiac deaths by 73 percent.
During a briefing Friday in Washington, D.C., Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson pointed out how the company’s practitioners in Colorado used Kaiser’s trademarked health information system to deliver better care to cardiac patients. The Collaborative Cardiac Care Service program uses integrated nursing and pharmacy teams that work collaboratively with heart disease patients and their doctors. The team is connected by technology that helps them deliver care. Activities such as lifestyle modification, medication management, patient education, laboratory results monitoring and management of adverse events are all coordinated through the program, which helps guide the patient through both short- and long-term care decisions.
