Kaiser Permanente: The Year in Summary
Kaiser Permanente’s mission of providing high-quality, affordable health care services and keeping our communities healthy has driven us since 1945 and has continued to be our guiding force as we navigated through the pandemic and the last 3 years.
In its third year in 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic was both disruptive and clarifying for the health care ecosystem and for Kaiser Permanente. Health care across the U.S. continued to face several related challenges, including high wage inflation, deferred care, workforce shortages, and skyrocketing drug costs.
Along with addressing these disruptions and challenges, we gained clarity that to meet evolving needs we must strive to bring together our nation’s fragmented health care system, move toward greater integration to personalize care and coverage, address the social implications of health and disease, and align financial incentives for better affordability and quality health outcomes.
Kaiser Permanente’s integrated model and value-based approach allow us to adapt our care model, accelerate innovation, and build our technology infrastructure and digital platform to provide care and service when, how, and where people need it. This has been so important to our ability to achieve our mission over the past several years.
Our care teams worked seamlessly together within Kaiser Permanente’s model to provide preventive and primary care, as well as care that had been delayed due to the pandemic. In 2022:
We prioritize quality outcomes in our care, tracking measures such as survival rates, mortality, and prevalence of certain diseases including in the areas of maternal and child health, cardiovascular care, cancer, and mental health and wellness. For example, Kaiser Permanente members are 33% less likely to experience premature death from heart disease than others living in their community; Black members are 47% less likely.
We launched the KP Medical Foundation in 2022, a new nonprofit, clinical-led organization to create a more aligned, unified, optimized, and outcomes-focused outpatient care experience for clinicians and members alike in our Colorado and Washington markets. The KP Medical Foundation provides another model for how we come together within Kaiser Permanente through a new structure that aligns leadership and operations in the markets.
Building healthier and more equitable communities is in Kaiser Permanente’s DNA. Having a safe place to live, enough money to pay the bills, access to healthy meals, and other social factors are essential to being healthy — and healthy people make up healthy communities. In 2022 we:
- Pledged $50 million for programs that help people meet their food and nutritional needs
- Expanded the size of our Thriving Communities Fund to $400 million with the goal of creating 30,000 affordable housing units by 2030
- Declared gun violence a public health crisis and established and committed $25 million to the Center for Gun Violence Research and Education
- Committed to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030 with the goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 — knowing there is a direct connection between climate change and the health and wellness of our communities
Our innovative approach to meeting our members’ and patients’ needs led to our mobile app and website setting a new digital standard for health care management. We are very proud to have won Design Company of the Year in Fast Company’s 2022 Innovation by Design awards, the first time this honor has been given to a health care organization. Throughout 2022, Kaiser Permanente conducted an average of 27,500 video visits per weekday. Our technology helps our members access care and manage their health through electronic health records, appointment reminders, and 24/7 virtual care.
Our physicians and employees are resilient, compassionate, and dedicated. We are proud that nearly 75% of them are represented by a union. In 2022, our Labor Management Partnership marked its 25th anniversary. It is the largest and longest-lasting partnership of its kind in the United States. We are also proud that nearly 70% of our employees and physicians are members of underrepresented and historically marginalized groups, reflecting the ethnic, racial, and cultural makeup of the communities we serve.
In 2022, our employees and physicians continued to work together to honor our historical roots; our mission; our members, patients, and customers; our communities; and each other. This report outlines the work that happened across our organization in 2022.