Total health is all around you.

The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) is a highly respected nonprofit organization that is dedicated to improving health care quality. In 2010, they evaluated hundreds of health plans on a number of measures. When they issued their Quality Compass® data for the year, Kaiser Permanente led the nation among all reporting commercial and Medicare health plans with top marks in the following 23 quality measures:

The Leapfrog Group is another organization that measures quality. The Leapfrog Hospital Survey is considered the gold standard for comparing hospitals' performance on the national standards of safety, quality, and efficiency that are most relevant to consumers and purchasers of health care. Each year they name their Leapfrog Top Hospitals. This honor rewards medical centers for outstanding success in areas including infection rates, safety practices, and mortality rates for common procedures and measures of efficiency.

Out of nearly 1,000 urban hospitals that were considered for the award and completed the Leapfrog survey only 53 were named "Top" hospitals. Sixteen of their Top Hospitals, or nearly one-third, were Kaiser Permanente: 10 in Northern California, and six in Southern California. That is almost three times more of our hospitals that earned that recognition in 2010, compared to 2009.

In 2010, the Care Continuum Alliance, a consortium with more than 200 organizational members who represent wellness, disease management, and care management organizations, gave Kaiser Permanente their Quality Impact Award for the "Greatest Impact on Health." We earned this recognition because of our well-known ALL/PHASE campaign. This innovative program was developed by our Department of Research, who identified a daily combination of three low-cost medications to reduce heart attacks and strokes. Kaiser Permanente leverages care registries to identify at-risk patients and connect physicians with patients who would benefit from the ALL/PHASE regimen.

Because of this program, the patients on this regimen had 60 percent fewer heart attacks and strokes. That translates to improving and saving many lives.

Every month, Harvard Business Review writes insightful stories about cutting edge issues in business. Their September 2010 issue has an article that describes and salutes the work we do to improve care processes.

"In health care, the mother of all service industries, Kaiser Permanente is taking innovative approaches to designing better ways of delivering care. KP's relatively modest up-front investments can yield dramatic cost and quality benefits more quickly than any whizbang technology.

To achieve these benefits, Kaiser has adopted a 'human-centered design' methodology that enlists health care providers and patients as collaborators in the innovation process."

We're proud of the acknowledgement, and we are proud of the philosophy behind it: that technology is a hugely valuable tool that is best used when it helps to make us more human, and ultimately provide excellent care.

As caregivers, we give a great deal of thought to making the end of life as dignified and graceful as possible for everyone. Typically, visitation rights are granted only to family members. But at Kaiser Permanente, we believe that any person who plays a significant role in a patient's life should be able to visit freely at the end of their loved one's life. That includes our patient's life partners, whether they are married or not.

In 2010, our policy on hospital visitation was recognized by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. Because of this policy (and our other support for a number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues), the Human Rights Campaign named us the first ever health and hospital system to earn a perfect 100 percent rating on their Healthcare Equality Index. We are proud of the award, but we are mostly proud of our policy, because it is simply the right thing to do.