Clinical Excellence

January 14, 2009

Charles Kenney Talks About Quality, Kaiser Permanente, and His Book, 'The Best Practice'

Best-selling author Charles Kenney talked about his new book, "The Best Practice," and Kaiser Permanente's considerable role in the book, in a recent podcast.

Kenney, formerly a journalist at the Boston Globe, explores in "The Best Practice" how the quality movement in health care evolved from a seldom-considered factor to an important focusin the industry. He devotes an entire chapter in the book, titled "Kaiser Permanente and the Future of Health Care," to Kaiser Permanente and its successful implementation of KP HealthConnect™, the world's largest civilian electronic health record.

In the book, Kenney states that "The key element of success was that Kaiser (Permanente) built a clinician-driven system. They had adopted a system that doctors had checked out and liked."

In this podcast, Kenney talks about organizations – both inside and outside of health care – that have embraced quality initiatives and have created better organizations, both for customers and for employees and physicians. One example of an organization that Kenney cited might surprise; suffice to say it has sold out its baseball stadium 400-plus consecutive times.

For more, download the podcast with Charles Kenney. Also, you now can subscribe to Kaiser Permanente News Center podcasts through iTunes. Point your browser at the News Center's iTunes podcast page and automatically receive podcasts as they're published. If you use Feedburner to download podcasts, go to http://feeds.feedburner.com/kaiserpermanentenewscenterpodcasts/ to download the latest News Center podcasts.