41 Facts About Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente, commonly known simply as Kaiser, is an American integrated managed care consortium, based in Oakland, California, United States, founded in 1945 by industrialist Henry J Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield.

Kaiser Permanente is made up of three distinct but interdependent groups of entities: the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc and its regional operating subsidiaries; Kaiser Foundation Hospitals; and the regional Permanente Medical Groups.

Kaiser Permanente is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare plans in the United States, with over 12 million members.

However, Kaiser Permanente has had disputes with its employees' unions; repeatedly faced civil and criminal charges for falsification of records and patient dumping; faced action by regulators over the quality of care it provided, especially to patients with mental health issues; and faced criticism from activists and action from regulators over the size of its cash reserves.

Kaiser Permanente provides care throughout eight regions in the United States.

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Each entity of Kaiser Permanente has its own management and governance structure, although all of the structures are interdependent and cooperative to a great extent.

Kaiser Permanente was the first chairman to not be a member of the Kaiser family.

Kaiser Permanente is administered through eight regions, including one parent and six subordinate health plan entities, one hospital entity, and nine separate, affiliated medical groups:.

Around the same time, The Kaiser Permanente Company was chartered as a vehicle to provide investment opportunities for the for-profit Kaiser Permanente Medical Groups.

In 1939, the Kaiser Permanente Company began work on several huge shipbuilding contracts in Oakland, and by the end of 1941 would control four major shipyards on the West Coast.

In January 1941, Henry Kaiser Permanente asked Garfield to set up an insurance plan for the Richmond workers, and a year later Kaiser Permanente asked Garfield to duplicate at Richmond what he had done at Desert Center and Mason City.

In 1944, Kaiser Permanente decided to continue the program after the war and to open it up to the general public.

In 1948, Kaiser established the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation, a U S -based nonprofit, private operating foundation focusing on the major health care issues facing the nation.

The Foundation, not associated with Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries, is an independent voice and source of facts and analysis for policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the general public.

In 1951, the organization acquired its current name when Henry Kaiser unilaterally directed the trustees of the health plans, hospital foundations, and medical groups to add his name before Permanente.

That same year, Kaiser Permanente began experiments with large-scale multiphasic screening to identify unknown conditions and to facilitate treatment of known ones.

Kaiser Permanente quickly ruined what should have been a simple project, and only a last-minute intervention by Keene and Trefethen in August 1960 prevented the total disintegration of the Hawaii organization.

In 1977, all six of Kaiser Permanente's regions had become federally qualified health maintenance organizations.

Elsewhere, Kaiser Permanente did not do as well, and its geographic footprint changed significantly in the 1990s.

In 1998, Kaiser Permanente sold its Texas operations, where reported problems had become so severe that the organization directed its lawyers to attempt to block the release of a Texas Department of Insurance report.

Kaiser Permanente closed health plans in Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina four years later.

In 1995, Kaiser Permanente celebrated its fiftieth anniversary as a public health plan.

In 2002, Kaiser Permanente abandoned its attempt to build its own clinical information system with IBM, writing off some $452 million in software assets.

Under George Halvorson's direction, Kaiser Permanente looked closely at two medical software vendors, Cerner and Epic Systems, ultimately selecting Epic as the primary vendor for a new system, branded KP HealthConnect.

Subsequently, a group of health policy academics who were experts on the NHS published a competing analysis claiming that Kaiser Permanente's costs were actually substantially higher than the NHS and for a younger and healthier population.

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The report found Kaiser Permanente had put systems in place to better track how patients were being cared for but still had not addressed problems with actually providing mental health care that complied with state and federal laws.

Kaiser Permanente appealed the findings, the order, and the fine, and sought to keep the proceedings closed, but in September 2014, in the face of the administrative judge's order to keep the proceedings open, and facing the beginning of public testimony, Kaiser Permanente withdrew the appeal and paid the $4 million.

In 2006 Kaiser Permanente settled five cases for alleged patient dumping—the delivery of homeless hospitalized patients to other agencies or organizations in order to avoid expensive medical care—between 2002 and 2005.

The city's decision to charge Kaiser Permanente reportedly was influenced by security camera footage, allegedly showing a 63-year-old patient, dressed in hospital gown and slippers, wandering toward a mission on Skid Row .

In 2004, Northern California Kaiser Permanente initiated an in-house program for kidney transplantation.

Northern California Kaiser Permanente performed 56 transplants in 2005, and twice that many patients died while waiting for a kidney.

Unlike other centers, the Kaiser Permanente program did not perform riskier transplants or use donated organs from elderly or other higher-risk people, which have worse outcomes.

Kaiser Permanente operates a Division of Research, which annually conducts between 200 and 300 studies, and the Center for Health Research, which in 2009 had more than 300 active studies.

Kaiser Permanente has created and operates a voluntary biobank of donated blood samples from members along with their medical record and the responses to a lifestyle and health survey.

Kaiser Permanente announced its plan to start a medical school in December, 2015, and the school welcomed its inaugural class in June, 2020.

Watchdogs have accused Kaiser Permanente of abusing the power imbalance inherent in the arbitration system.

Kaiser Permanente engages in many cases whereas a customer will usually engage in just one and Kaiser Permanente can reject any arbitrator unilaterally, thus they can select company-friendly arbitrators over those that rule in favor of customers.

Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights has said that Kaiser Permanente's retained profits are evidence that Kaiser Permanente policies are overpriced and that health insurance regulation is needed.

Kaiser Permanente has been criticized by activists and state regulators for the size of its cash reserves.

Those funds were in Kaiser Permanente's risk-based capital account, held to pay for disasters or major projects.

In 2008, the Colorado regulator required Kaiser Permanente to spend down its reserves; after negotiations Kaiser Permanente agreed to spend $155 million of its reserves giving credits to its clients and building clinics in underserved parts of the state.