Kaiser Permanente is a titan of the managed health care industry. Established in 1945, it has grown to enormous proportions, serving approximately 9 million members through the efforts of 180,600 employees. Such gigantic proportions and wide arrays of services necessitate complex management. The organization has succeeded in establishing management that works "from the top down" with mixed results.
Assessment of the Various Management Levels and Their Role in Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente is a managed care conglomerate initially developed in the 1930's and 1940's for construction, shipyard and steel mill employees, then opened to the public in October 1945 (Kaiser Permanente, 2012). Today Kaiser Permanente works as two partner organizations: Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, which is not-for-profit, and Permanente Medical Groups, which is for-profit (Kaiser Permanente, 2012). Based in Oakland, California, Kaiser boasts approximately 9 million members (Kaiser Permanente, 2012) and 180,600 employees (Kaiser Permanente, 2012).

Kaiser Permanente operates in 8 regions, including….

Kaiser Permanente Quality Assurance Program
Kaiser Permanente

Facility description. Kaiser Permanente is a healthcare organization that had its origins in the pre-war industrial sector. The program offered health care for workers in the steel mills, the shipyards, and the construction companies in a nation just recovering from the depression and attempting to stand apart from the conflict and volatility evidenced across the globe.

A young surgeon, Sidney Garfield, borrowed money to build Contractors General Hospital with the idea of serving the thousands of contractors building the Los Angeles Aqueduct near Desert Center -- which was in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The 12-bed hospital found it difficult to get insurance companies to pay for the treatment of injured and ill contractors. Some of the workers did not have insurance, but Dr. Garfield treated them anyway and the hospital's debts piled up. With the help of man named Harold Hatch, Dr. Garfield convinced….

In Georgia, close to forty of Kaiser Permanente members are African-American, in Hawaii over half of Kaiser members are either of Asian or Hawaiian descent, and in Southern California twenty-four percent of members are Latino, with an additional twelve percent of members in the region identifying as African-American (Chong 2002). This diversity demonstrates a strong commitment to cultural awareness and the respect for each individual patient that Kaiser holds at its core.
Services Offered

The basic services offered by Kaiser Permanente were outlined above, but a more detailed look at these services is necessary to come to a true understanding of the organization. Essentially, the company offers both an insurance-like pre-payment program for medical care and it is connected to (though it does not technically operate) physicians' groups that provide care paid for by the pre-payment (Kaiser Permanente 2011). The company also directly operates hospitals in some regions, which provide non-profit….

WHY WAS IT A SMAT Management MOVE?

There are several reasons that this commitment and plan provided a smart management move on the part of the organization.

One of the first things the HMO did once the plan was announced was to begin challenging other health care foundations and organizations to provide similar services to their communities. Kaiser is large enough that it can provide a $100 million plan to the public however, many of its competitors cannot which provided the opportunity for Kaiser to appear to be more generous and community minded than its competitors as they failed to meet the challenge (Announced, 1997).

The HMO was able to parlay the move into a public relations gold mine with many speeches and announcements surrounding the announcement to move forward with the plan.

California needs a healthy, productive, well-educated workforce for the 21st century, but millions of children and youth are at a disadvantage….

Kaiser Permanente - Marketing Forces and Diversification
Kaiser Permanente shares the concerns of other American hospitals regarding competing effectively with other hospitals while constantly improving quality of care. Kaiser is unique, however, in that its scope and resources allow it to mount an aggressive, nationwide marketing campaign directed at least theoretically to every American. Though it is difficult to reduce the success of Kaiser's marketing activities to numbers, Kaiser certainly shows signs of marketing success through extensive recognition, including but not limited to awards touting Kaiser's excellence and effectiveness.

Marketing Plan

Kaiser Permanente serves approximately 9 million members and operates in 8 regions, including Northern California, Southern California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, an area embracing Maryland, Virginia and ashington, DC, Ohio, and an area comprised of Oregon and ashington (Kaiser Permanente, 2012). In addition, Kaiser Permanente acts as "the caregiver, the hospital, the laboratory, and the pharmacy" (Kaiser Permanente, 2012). Due to these extensive….

Kaiser Permanente (N. California) NCQA Accreditation
Kaiser Permanente (Northern California) NCQA Accreditation

Accreditation is a comprehensive evaluation process in which a health care organization's systems, processes and performance are examined by an impartial external organization -- an accrediting body -- to ensure that it is conducting business in a manner that meets predetermined criteria and is consistent with national standards (Iglehart, 1996). The 2010 federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) calls for use of accreditation to ensure quality in the managed health care sector and provide resources to state policymakers through public-private partnerships. Accreditation also helps promote compliance with state law. States use accreditation as a part of their overall effort to evaluate and improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of health care.

The accreditation process seeks to identify best practices and promote continuous quality improvements through ongoing performance measurements (Katzfey, 2004). Specialized advisory groups help to draft and periodically review accreditation standards. The independent….

Strategic Alignment
In the last several years, the Strategic Alignment Maturity model is focusing on understanding how an organization can evolve with the different challenges they are facing. This is achieved by carefully examining the business and IT configuration of the firm. To fully understand how this works requires comparing the model with an actual health care organization (i.e. Kaiser Permanente). These insights will illustrate its effectiveness and how it helps companies to adapt. ("About Us," 2013) (Wheatley, 2013) (Chandler, 2003)

I.1 Business Strategy 2

Kaiser Permanente is a managed care provider. They are focused on primarily delivering affordable low cost solutions to patients. This is accomplished by controlling expenses and investing in areas that will address their continuing needs. To achieve the objectives the firm operates three divisions to include: the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Permanente Medical Groups. The different kinds of products / services offered by….

Personal Statement: Radiologic Technology Program
To me, there is nothing more fulfilling and exciting than being part of a team that alleviates the suffering of others. Unknown to many, mostly those serving in other professions, working in the medical field has its own unique challenges. It is the realization that mine is a unique role - a role that involves helping others -- that motivates me to keep working in this noble field. It is this same reason that motivates me to become a radiologic technologist. In addition to matching my skill-set, the radiologic technology field does, to a large extent, match my experience -- spanning over seven years in a healthcare setting. In the final analysis therefore, successful completion of the Radiologic Technology Program at GAMA will be a logical step towards the further development and enhancement of my career in the medical arena. Indeed, professional growth in the medical….

VISTA helps eliminate lengthy delays for treatment, a way that all health care providers can stand to benefit from.
'Question 4

VISTA is the best known and most heavily practiced system of its type. This does not mean competing software or architecture is unavailable. Kaiser Permanente's Health Connect system is beginning to play a major role in how medicine is practiced. According to its website, "KP HealthConnect provides care teams with access to patient information and the latest best practices all in one place to further enhance patient safety and quality care while increasing convenience and coordination. The comprehensive health information system securely connects more than 8.6 million people to their physicians, nurses, and pharmacists, personal information, and the latest medical knowledge."

As long as the medical industry is a profitable one, than competing health managing software systems should be able to compete for business. In a better world however, health care….

Envisioning Future of Physician Leader of Medical Group Practice
Health care industry to get financial and management praises are also adopting the strategies of retail giants Wal-Mart, Google and Amazon. A research study have suggested that merely 3% of American physicians are in regular contact with their patients through emails or whatever means and one fifth of Medicare recipients that had visited hospital will end up back at the hospital within a month or even less. It was found through research that this figure of high frequency of repeat patients can be reduced drastically if doctor or nurse followed up with the patients after checking them. Doctors or nurses don't bother to follow up with the patient after reasonable time of their check up like a week because they don't find any incentive in doing so (Nobel, 2011).

The management and organizational structure of hospital is as important as any other profit….

Belonging to Alliant Credit Union Mean to Me?
I am on track to graduate from a Nuclear Medicine program in September of 2015. his is an important step for me because the nuclear medicine program holds out great hope for more efficient strategies for diagnosing and treating disease -- and healing people who are suffering.

After graduation I will pursue a career at Kaiser Permanente. I will pay off my credit card debt and begin a savings and retirement program at Alliant Credit Union, to assure my own financial security but also to ensure that my parents have the resources to be comfortable and happy in their retirement years.

Going back to 2009, when I bought my first automobile -- which is a huge step for a young person in terms of the need for independence, for transportation and the need to learn how to manage one's finances -- I have been….

SPENDING IN U.S. HEALTHCAE
July 26, 2013 ASSESSMENT: Policy topic Search Selection. esearch internet key words "Health" "Health Policy" select a policy topic interest. My selection topic "Cost Spending." You policy individual assignment.

Cost and spending: U.S. healthcare

While Americans would no doubt like to think that their healthcare system is the best in the world, the data confirms only that it is the most expensive. According to Kaiser Permanente, 16% of our nation's GNP is devoted to healthcare, "the highest among the world's industrialized nations. Over the past decade, the pace of total health care spending has grown faster than inflation and the growth in national income" (Costs and spending, 2013, Kaiser Permanente). One of the most frequently cited reasons for the high costs of healthcare is the inefficiencies of the American private insurance system. While in nations such as Canada and the United Kingdom there is a 'single payer' system….

People and Talent Management
The following work examines people and talent management and the importance that this has for today's organizations. The works reviewed in the study demonstrate the need for and the methods used in today's people and talent management. eviewed is the work of Stockley (2011) as well as other various works that relate the processes and methods of people and talent management in today's organizations.

Findings in this study include that talent management is somewhat different for each organization because talent is different for each organization, or in other words, what is valued as talent in one organization may not necessarily be valued as 'talent' in another organization. Talent then is organization specific and each organization provides support toward talent management based upon that specific organization's values and what they view as 'talent'. It is necessary to manage the people within the organization in order to identify the organization's….

Companies like Kaiser Permanente are also getting involved with EH. A recent study that was done in Hawaii showed, however, that doctors were actually slower at treating patients and updating their information when they used electronic recordkeeping (Scott, et al., 2005). In addition, there was some concern as to whether the records would be safe and whether software problems or other electronic slow-downs would keep doctors from getting (and providing) information as quickly as could be done with paper charts (Scott, et al., 2005). omano and Stafford (2010) stated that their study did not show an increase in quality when EH was used. That was a concern, because the opposite conclusion was expected. However, even though the question of how well EH will perform in the future has been raised by several studies, the use of it is still increasing in medical settings that have more than one doctor as….

Producing a Healthier iscuit: Evidence for Adding Dietary Fiber
The importance of fiber

One common way to improve the health profile of baked goods is to add fiber, usually in the form of whole grain products vs. refined white flour. It is important to note when developing the nutritional profile of the proposed biscuit that not all types of fiber are created equal. There are two basic kinds of fiber: soluble and insoluble. The main difference between the two is that "soluble fiber dissolves in water. Insoluble fiber does not" (Zelman 2012). Soluble fiber attracts water and contributes to the body's sense of fullness, making dieting easier for many people. Insoluble fiber passes through the body undigested and thus is important for regular bowel movements. Oatmeal is a good source of soluble fiber; whole wheat is a good source of insoluble fiber and both could be tasty additions to a new Snacks'R'Us….