Kaiser Permanente - Quality of Care

Quality of Care

In the California Healthcare Quality Report Card 2011 Edition, Kaiser Permanente's Northern California and Southern California regions, Kaiser received 4 out of 4 possible stars in Meeting National Standards of Care. Kaiser North and South also received 3 out of 4 stars in Members Rate Their HMO.

U.S. News and World Report, in its 2006 annual ranking of US commercial health plans, ranked Kaiser Foundation Health Plans as follows, out of 246 rated plans:

• 45. Northern California
• 57. Colorado
• 65. Georgia
• 67. Ohio
• 90. Southern California
• 94. Hawaii
• 106. Mid-Atlantic States
• 121. Northwest

A 2004 Consumer Reports survey of planholders ranked Kaiser Permanente overall as average or better. It showed below average ratings in the Colorado and Mid-Atlantic regions for two measures of quality of care: 'care from doctors', and the 'quality of their primary care physician'. The same survey ranked Kaiser Permanente's Northern California region as the best HMO overall among rated plans.

KP's performance has been attributed to three practices: First, KP places a strong emphasis on preventive care, reducing costs later on. Second, its doctors are salaried rather than paid per service, which removes the main incentive for doctors to perform unnecessary procedures. Thirdly, KP attempts to minimize the time patients spend in high-cost hospitals by carefully planning their stay and by shifting care to outpatient clinics. This practice results in lower costs per member, cost savings for KP and greater doctor attention to patients. A comparison to the UK's National Health Service found that patients spend 2-5 times as much time in NHS hospitals as compared to KP hospitals.

Their habits of offering preventive care and managing chronic disease led a journalist writing for The New York Times to propose the Kaiser system in 2004 as a model for U.S. healthcare.