How We Can Be of Service

At the beginning of each new year, I try to give myself time and space to think about the people who make my work possible — those I collaborate with, and the people who motivate me to do the work. The team I work with at Kaiser Permanente includes world-class public health professionals, philanthropic investors, and dedicated social justice advocates. Together, we work to improve the lives of the 65 million people who live in communities served by Kaiser Permanente.

Each of us has been drawn to serve these communities, and service means something specific to each of us. Being “of service” requires us to hone in on the challenges communities face, and collaborate with knowledgeable, trusted partners to overcome those barriers to health. We want to ensure health access to all, and we do that by providing individuals served by Kaiser Permanente, or by our safety-net partners, with integrated clinical and social services.

In the spirit of service, I spent this past Martin Luther King, Jr. Day side by side with 3,800 Kaiser Permanente employees. We volunteered with hundreds of local groups across eight states — planting gardens, building green spaces, sprucing up classrooms, cleaning transitional housing centers, and connecting with the communities we serve. For every employee who signed up to volunteer, the organization donated a dollar to the National Civil Rights Museum in honor of Dr. King. This was one day of service at Kaiser Permanente, but service drives us every day.

Ensuring Access to Health

We believe that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness require total health — and that includes equal access to high-quality health care for all. Too often, the greatest challenge to equitable access is a person’s ability to pay for care. That’s why a cornerstone of our strategy is to expand affordable care and coverage to underserved populations. Some of these efforts include:

• Providing charitable care so that more than 50,000 people received coverage in 2017, and another 221,000 received some form of medical financial assistance to help them afford their healthcare.
• Directing $36 million in grants to help safety net clinics and systems provide care to low-income and marginalized communities in 2017 alone.
• Piloting a new Community Health Care Program that provides coverage to young adults in low-income households across 3 counties in California’s central valley.

In 2013, we set a goal to provide care and coverage to 1 million Medicaid and Charitable Health Coverage members by the end of 2018, and that goal has nearly been met. Now, our task is to build and expand our local efforts, creating a more comprehensive approach to help all of the communities we serve.

Clinical Limits

Expanding care and coverage is a crucial need, as each of us will require medical care at some point in our lives. But there is a limit to what help can be offered from a doctor’s office, a hospital, or a treatment center. People live their lives outside the four walls of a medical center, and their health needs to be cultivated outside those walls as well.

Imagine doing everything you can as a care provider to improve the health of your patient. You diagnose and treat her hypertension, you address her mental health needs, maybe you help her identify additional local resources for follow-up care. But what if when that patient leaves your office, her main concern is whether they will have a bed at the shelter that night, or if she’ll be sleeping on a park bench?

Without a safe, stable place to live, it is impossible to maintain any health improvements achieved in a medical setting. That’s why the dramatic increase in the homeless population up and down the West Coast is such an important issue that deserves our attention. At Kaiser Permanente, we are building on what we’ve learned from previous efforts to address issues of homelessness in our communities, including:

• Constructing a 400-unit housing development with an onsite medical clinic in Portland, Oregon.
• Creating a transitional housing program that will provide emergency, short-term housing to residents who are homeless and battling severe mental illness or medical conditions.
• Supporting initiatives that offer a coordinated response to those most in need.

Collaborating with hospital systems, municipal governments and community organizations, we are learning more every day about what works, and how we can extend our efforts, to get people off of the streets and into healthier, more stable environments. When we serve those most in need, we lift up entire communities.

That’s why we support all acts of service — whether they be large or small — that can result in big, sustainable and powerful outcomes regarding community health. It was inspiring to see Kaiser Permanente teams out in full force this week. Alongside our communities, I thank you for your service!