Quality Management Program Design

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Kaiser Permanente: Managing Quality to Increase Customer Satisfaction

Kaiser Permanente is the largest managed care organization in the United States, serving 8.9 million members in 37 hospitals and 611 outpatient facilities. The organization operates in 11 states, and in 2011 had operating revenue of $47.9 billion dollars (Kaiser Permanente, 2012). The organization was founded in 1945 and has frequently been at the forefront of innovations in health care, introducing prepaid health plans to make health care more affordable, physician group practice to allow doctors to maximize their ability to care for patients, and a focus on prevention as much as caring for the sick and injured. Furthermore, Kaiser Permanente introduced the organized delivery system, in which as many services as possible were placed under one roof. The organization has a commitment to quality, working to deliver quality care to its members to ensure satisfaction.

Kaiser Permanente faces challenges in delivering quality health care through an enormous network of physicians, health care workers, and patient needs. System thinking can help Kaiser Permanente improve service to patients, save money, and cut waste. It is estimated that "90 percent of all defects in the delivery of a product or service cannot be traced to an individual, but to a system" (Sherman, 2010). An immediate improvement to the system would be to chart process maps for the five most commonly occurring visits to Kaiser Hospitals. This number could be expanded eventually to include member trips to outpatient facilities, but initially the concept is to identify the most frequent reasons for hospitalizations and map the common process. A process map for each of these reasons (i.e. cardiology, cancer, etc) would then identify how to unite methods and procedures from admittance through treatment and discharge to ...