In the Community

December 4, 2007

Annual Community Forum Shares Ideas for Aiding Underserved Communities

Kaiser Permanente's third annual Care Management Institute Community Forum brought together close to 200 people to share ideas about how to improve health outcomes, patient-centered care and well-being in underserved populations and communities.

The Forum was held for the second straight year at the Sidney Garfield Health Care Innovation Center, a Kaiser Permanente facility in which physicians and staff can model and test innovative ideas, care processes, and health care technologies in a hands-on, mocked up clinical environment. The Center is in San Leandro, Calif., just south of Kaiser Permanente's national headquarters in Oakland.

"The level of trust has really expanded in the past few years. The way we look at it is that no one person or group has all the answers," said Winston Wong, MD, medical director for Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit and director of Disparities Improvement and Quality Initiatives for The Permanente Federation. "(The forum) is really a learning and supportive environment, rather than a seminar and presentation."

Supporting that point, half of the conference's 170-plus attendees came from Kaiser Permanente, and half from community-based health care organizations and groups in California and the Washington, D.C. area.

One key focus of the Oct. 23 conference was exploring health and wellness issues for African American women. Consistent with that, keynote speakers Gayle Porter and Marilyn Gaston, MD, talked about their work building and supporting grassroots "sister circles" in which African American women work collaboratively to improve their health and well-being.

Drs. Gaston and Porter are the cofounders of the Gaston and Porter Health Improvement Center. Dr. Gaston was the first African American woman to direct a public health service bureau in the United States, and the second African American woman to serve as Assistant Surgeon General. Dr. Porter is an internationally known lecturer in the area of mental health, particularly as it relates to minority children, women and families, and was a senior mental health advisor for the American Institute for Research.

Community Forum breakout sessions featured patient-centered care topics such as "Health Communication for Today's Multicultural Hip Hop Youth Generation" and "Culturally Competent Adolescent Health Care." In one panel discussion, a public health physician discussed how he helped members of a Laotian community manage and improve their health care situations through group visits – even though the doctor did not speak Laotian, and the community members themselves spoke multiple dialects.

Another speaker, San Francisco General Hospital internist Dean Schillinger, talked about research showing that automated phone calls to patients can actually prove very effective in improving health outcomes. Dr. Schillinger also is an investigator with Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research in Oakland.

The annual Community Forum is sponsored by Kaiser Permanente Community Benefit and the Kaiser Permanente Care Management Institute.