Our Point of View

January 21, 2009

Letter to the Editor RE: Sacramento Bee Article About Kaiser Permanente Appointment and Advice Call Centers

RE: "State Probes whether Kaiser call centers endanger patients" (January 11): We were disappointed with your unbalanced portrayal of Kaiser Permanente's Appointment and Advice Call Centers.

Kaiser Permanente is dedicated to providing our patients with superior 21st century health care. Our call centers provide safe, personalized access to information and care for the convenience of our members, around the clock.

Our call centers handle 14 million calls per year – most of which are non-urgent requests for appointments and general information. Non-urgent calls are handled by telephone service representatives, who play essentially the same role as a receptionist in any physician's office.

Any caller requesting advice, or whose answers to doctor-written questions require speaking to a clinician, is transferred to a registered nurse. Callers who describe urgent symptoms are transferred within seconds to a nurse.

We have a state-of-the-art quality assurance program that monitors the performance of all call center staff, and more than 90 percent of our members rate our call center service excellent to good.

Long before this article was published, we invited the Department of Managed Health Care to review our call center operations. We're pleased they accepted our invitation, and we look forward to their visit and answering their questions.

Donald C. Dyson, M.D.
Associate Executive Director
The Permanente Medical Group
Kaiser Permanente