Kaiser Permanente Care Stories | Patients teaching about Integrated care through their stories

Kaiser Permanente Care Stories | Kaiser Permanente Members and Caregivers Talk About Integrated Care |

One of my mantras has always been, “I won’t tell you what this means for your patients, your patients will tell you what this means for your patients (you just have to listen)”

Kaiser Permanente Care Stories is a new blog produced by colleagues at Kaiser Permanente, and features on the home page a panel of 4 members (and their families) that I moderated in front of a large audience last year (I am not in the video, I was the “Oprah”).

I wrote about this experience when it happened (See: Bringing the Patient Experience to Life : Focus on Patient Stories (Presentation)) and remarked at the time how impressed I was that the concern on the part of our patients was less about keeping the experience private, more that the experiences were not shared enough. Asked if I could post their experience on my blog with their real names, they all said “Absolutely!” in one form or another.

Colleagues Farra Levin (@farralevin) understand that desire and now work with patients to share more, so in these situations they create a durable consent and monitor its expiration. When the time period of the consent runs out, related content is removed.

This is great to see in the post-HIPAA world, the idea that protecting members includes guarding their privacy and partnering to promote their successes, too.

In the case of patients and families receiving care in an integrated system, the successes are different enough compared to the rest of health care that they are worth sharing. This includes a health system that is driven to anticipate people’s needs to keep them healthy, to coordinate communication between clinicians and patients in near real-time, to get needed care quickly in an environment where  there is no reward for medical error because the care is prepaid.

See what you think, compare to what you experience, post in the comments.

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Ted Eytan, MD