Crowdsource Request: Keynote for Labor-Management Parntership all-hands – “Social innovation”

As I continue to do from time to time, before I give a presentation to an audience, I like to ask the crowd for advice. Why? More information is better / listening is the new talking…

I have been honored to be invited to speak at the annual Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership All Hands meeting:

The Labor-Management Parntership all-hands meeting brings together more than 100 of our Kaiser Permanente management and labor leaders from all of the KP regions as well as people who support our member/patient-facing (substitution by Ted: I prefer this term over “frontline”) teams in doing performance improvement work. The LMP community is excited about total health, patient empowerment, diversity and innovation. We think you could challenge us to think even bigger than we do now in terms of what we can do to transform Kaiser Permanente and health care in general. 

I will certainly try, with help, and really with great respect for the Labor Management Partnership (@LMPTalk), something I was never taught about in medical school, and one of just a few uniquely awesome things in health care that I only learned about since I came to Kaiser Permanente:

The Labor Management Partnership (LMP) is the largest and longest-lasting partnership of its kind in the country. Created in 1997, it is based on a series of agreements between the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, made up of 27 union locals, Kaiser Permanente and the Permanente medical groups in each region. Today, it covers almost 100,000 union members and tens of thousands of managers and physicians.

So that’s the group, that’s the task, and I’m providing a few things below on background

1. A presentation I gave at Stanford Division of Biomedical Informatics

Health is the new HIT – Stanford Biomedical Informatics 207 | July 31 2014 from Ted Eytan

2. A super secret YouTube video of a talk that I gave to the innovative Kaiser Permanente Colorado (@KPColorado) in 2013 that’s not supposed to be available online. Shh, don’t tell anyone.

Health is the new HIT – Stanford Biomedical Informatics 207 | July 31 2014 from Ted Eytan

2. A super secret YouTube video of a talk that I gave to the innovative Kaiser Permanente Colorado (@KPColorado) in 2013 that’s not supposed to be available online. Shh, don’t tell anyone.

3. A TED talk I gave with a patient (of course), the one and only Regina Holiday (@ReginaHolliday) in 2012.

Now that you know what I’ve been asked to do and what I’ve done before, feel free to let me know in the comments:

  • What would you want to see more of if you were in this audience
  • What would you like to see less of if you were in this audience
  • Social Innovation – it’s the topic I’d like to move this to. Does that resonate with you?
  • Something about you – are you in a union and can you give advice to someone who isn’t and wants to support the transformation of health care with union partners?

Thanks a ton – comment below, or just tweet me directly: @tedeytan – As I said above, I did go to medical school, I’ve never been a union member, and the best doctors know what they don’t know and work to respect the people they work with and serve every day.

3 Comments

Hello Ted:

I am really excited that you will be speaking at our meeting! I work as a manager in the LMP leading our UBT program in Colorado.

“Social Innovation” does resonate to me. It is literally what I think we can do with the Healthy Workforce initiatives (become healthier ourselves, make our communities healthy), and the UBTs (model a new way to work together and improve care). What we are doing could have a very wide reach outside of the organization, and even outside of the members/patients we serve into our communities. What are your thoughts on how we can maximize and accelerate that impact we can have?

Biggest advice I have on your last question and I know you already know this; our member facing employees truly do have the answers to improvement. They just need to be given the tools and support to make those ideas happen..

Joseph (JJ),

Thank you for the warm welcome and your comment!

I am glad Social Innovation has relevance to you, and I agree that UBTs and Workforce Initiatives are a great model. I hope this public conversation we are having is one way to maximize/accelerate. Many health care professionals / patients who come through the Center for Total Health are not aware of these innovations. We of course inform them when they come to see us 🙂 talking about them here as colleagues in the social space also is important. Both the conversation and the endorsement we show as we discuss.

Awesome advice and reinforced by several of your colleagues who I have chatted with, which is fantastic. And also +1 for using “member facing” terminology. I plan to avoid any war-related terms (“frontline”,”triage”,”trenches”) because I believe we are at peace with our members, our colleagues, and vice versa. Keep the ideas coming, thanks for your collegiality and see you soon,

Ted

Ted Eytan, MD