#KPLantern is beginning – Human Centered Insights into Transgender Person Health, to make it better

KPLantern- Help Kaiser Permanente Become a Leader in trans*-inclusive care 51518
KPLantern- Help Kaiser Permanente Become a Leader in trans*-inclusive care (View on Flickr)

Beginning next week, I am (temporarily) joining the nationally recognized Kaiser Permanente Innovation Consultancy (@KPInnovation) for KPLantern:

Lantern is a project that Kaiser Permanente is undertaking to gain insight into the diverse experiences, challenges, and goals of being a transgender person in our current society and use that insight to better design health and care resources and experiences for our transgender members.

For the past several years I have been working with our members, staff, nurses, doctors, leaders, communities on the journey to support the total health of all of the populations we serve, which includes people who are transgender. It’s the way of Total Health.

This is, for me, an opportunity to learn to do that better, via human-centered design approaches, with a great team, supported by a great organization that is ready to lead in providing transgender person health care.

And by lead, we mean by being great collaborators, community citizens, respectful partners with our members, their loved ones, and their communities. The team, led by Dana Ragouzeos and Katherine Duong, has a ton of experience in human centered design across a swath of projects and vulnerable populations + the curiosity to learn more. Check out the Consultancy’s portfolio online – it’s fantastic and engaging.

The project is under the umbrella of health care quality improvement, which means that there are important (and required) protections in place around the confidentiality of the work, the findings, and the people who we learn from, similar to health care itself. These protections bring safety for the people who we engage, and credibility of the work. We’re here to improve the health and lives of the people we serve – that’s the goal. I may speak of progress in the work, but won’t post any protected information.

This flyer will start going out to recruit subjects for the field work. Feel free to circulate it yourself, add comments to me below, and follow-along here. Hashtag is #KPLantern, the project will go through May, 2015. The Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health team (@KPTotalHealth) will be participating along with the Consultancy.

We’re here because we support the total health of 9.5 million people. The prize, though, is the 316 million Americans who will find themselves so lucky to be in a country and community enriched by someone they know who is L,G,B,T,Q, in good health, and achieving their life goals.

The name of this project comes from two places. The first is the location where a team of passionate people dreamed it up, on the corner of Eastern Lantern and Golden Lantern in Dana Point, CA at the 2014 Permanente Executive Leadership Summit. The second is the fact that this is a unique opportunity for us to shine light on a population that has not been holistically served by the health care system. We have the opportunity to illuminate real, inspiring opportunities.

Eastern Lantern and Golden Lantern Streets, Dana Point California (View on Flickr.com)

Transgender person care wasn’t on the map when Kaiser Permanente’s first hospital was created in 1933, but the values that created this work were. It’s in our DNA 🙂

Kaiser Wakes the Doctors Book 33950

Desert Center, 1933 (View on Flickr)

Ted Eytan, MD