Why Kaiser Permanente?

As the nation’s largest nonprofit integrated health plan, Kaiser Permanente is able to offer its Fellows a depth and breadth of experience not possible in many traditional fellowship programs. The unique characteristics of our organization – and our program - include:

Scope: Kaiser Permanente serves approximately 8.7 million members in nine states and the District of Columbia. Such size allows Fellows to learn about the scale and impact of projects across a large patient population.
Integration: Kaiser Permanente is a vertically-integrated health system with hospital, health plan and medical group leadership working in coordination. Fellows have the unique opportunity to view the organization from multiple perspectives.
Partnership: Our Labor Management Partnership is the largest and most complex health care partnership in the United States, with the most unions, operating units, and employees. Fellows will work in a labor management partnership environment and experience the power of partnership in achieving organizational goals.

Mission

Kaiser Permanente's founding principles of partnership, integration, and prevention have been central to our success for more than 60 years. Our organization evolved from industrial health care programs for construction, shipyard and steel mill workers during World War II, when our founders advanced the concept of pre-paid, preventive care.

Today, Kaiser Permanente is an organization that continually works to elevate the state of health care with progressive products, services and advancements. Our vision of the future remains focused on improving the health of our members and the communities we serve.

Impact

Thanks to the dedication of our 152,000 employees and physicians, in a single year we schedule more than 34 million outpatient visits, deliver 85,000 babies, perform 452,000 surgeries, and fill about 113 million prescriptions. In California, more than one in three commercially insured individuals is a Kaiser Permanente member.

Leadership

Our leadership in the practice of medicine includes our focus on physician decision-making and evidence-based medicine. Through our clinical research centers, we operate the largest nonacademic research program in the United States, sharing our findings with the entire medical community. And as a not-for-profit organization, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan & Hospital’s revenues fund numerous community benefit programs that include providing direct health care coverage for uninsured families, community-based health partnerships, and research and collaboration with community organizations.

Innovation

Kaiser Permanente continually incorporates new technology, systems, equipment and clinical evidence to improve quality of care. As one example, our organization is currently implementing Kaiser Permanente HealthConnect, believed to be the largest civilian electronic health record system in the United States. The system enables health care practitioners to access electronic health records, decision-support tools, and evidence-based protocols in real time as they treat patients in the exam room. Kaiser Permanente patients can also email their doctors, schedule routine appointments and request prescription refills online.

Excellence & Quality

Kaiser Permanente is nationally recognized as an organization that delivers high quality health care and services.

US News & World Report reported that both Kaiser Permanente of Northern & Southern California ranked as the top health plan in California. Kaiser Permanente of Northern California is the only commercial plan in the state to make the magazine’s “Top 50” health plans nationwide.
Kaiser Permanente Northern & Southern California both received the best possible score—four stars in every category—getting healthy, getting better, living with illness, access and service, and qualified providers—and an overall accreditation rating of “Excellent” for both Commercial and Medicare Plans on the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) State of Health Care Quality 2008 report card (www.ncqa.org).
Both Kaiser Permanente Northern & Southern California earned higher marks on overall HMO and Quality Care ratings than any other health plan in California on the 2008 Quality of Care Report Card from the California Office of the Patient Advocate (OPA). (www.opa.ca.gov).

To learn more about the organization, our history, and our mission and values, visit the following websites:

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