Clinical Excellence
March 1, 2012
‘Quest for the Best’: Kaiser Permanente’s Seven-Decade Quality Journey
“Quest for the Best” is an eight-part series on Kaiser Permanente’s “A History of Total Health” blog that chronicles the organization’s perpetual efforts to devise and refine ways to measure and improve quality of patient care. Installments will be posted weekly.
Part 1 tells the story of Kaiser Permanente’s early days in the World War II shipyards and its leaders’ careful physician selection, staff education and support for research into the 1940s and the 1950s.
Parts 2 and 3 trace the quality movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and discuss how Kaiser Permanente addressed government and other regulatory agencies’ requirements for quality monitoring. Part 4 documents the birth of the National Committee for Quality Assurance in its first incarnation in 1979, and its subsequent resurrection as an independent care rating body in 1990.
Part 5 chronicles the 1990s, when Total Quality Management gained favor as the best style of quality assessment and improvement. Part 6 recounts the formation of The Permanente Federation in 1997 and the launching of the Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute in 1999.
Part 7 discusses the value of data in quality assessment and improvement, and how Kaiser Permanente’s recent implementation of its robust electronic health record system enhances the ability to evaluate quality and to conduct research with an eye to making care better. Part 8 profiles Sam Sapin, MD, a Southern California Permanente Medical Group pediatric cardiologist whose career paralleled Kaiser Permanente's quality quest.
Read this series on “A History of Total Health”
- Part 1: Quality Efforts in Kaiser Permanente's Early Days
- Part 2: Kaiser Permanente's Struggle to Prove its Quality
- Part 3: Kaiser Permanente Physicians Step Up to Define Quality
- Part 4: Birth of the National Committee for Quality Assurance
- Part 5: Total Quality Management in the 1990s
- Part 6: Best Practices Support Quality Care
- Part 7: Electronic Data System Drives Quality Efforts Forward
- Part 8: Profile of Sam Sapin, MD, Southern California Quality Pioneer
