In 2009, as the worst recession in decades deepened and the unemployment rate rose, about 50
million people in the United States were left uninsured. They had no coverage for basic needs like flu shots, mammograms, or prenatal care. And they had no financial protection against potentially catastrophic events like heart attacks, serious injuries, or the onset of cancer.
Just as bad, cash-strapped communities had less to spend on vital public services that contribute to the health of communities, like safe streets, clean parks, and food banks.
Kaiser Permanente responded by increasing our Community Benefit contributions and activities to a record level—$1.7 billion, a 43 percent increase over 2008— in response to the health challenges facing Americans. In total, we provided grants to 2,098 organizations in our communities last year.
Our work falls into three broad areas: providing access to high-quality care to low-income,
underserved people; creating safe, healthy communities and environments where people live, work, and play; and developing important new medical knowledge and sharing it widely. All this work supports the goal of health equity by reducing or eliminating disparities in health and health care.
To sum up 2009 in a few short words, we worked to create three vital outcomes: Healthy people. Healthy environments. New health knowledge.
Increasing our care and coverage
In 2009, as the recession spread across America, millions of people, including many Kaiser Permanente members, lost their jobs and, in many cases, their job-based health insurance. Studies show that more than one-third of individuals who have lost jobs that provided health coverage have become uninsured for six months or more.
Kaiser Permanente responded on multiple fronts. We increased our coverage and care for low-income families, children, and individuals, reaching more than 113,000 people through our Charitable Health Coverage programs. We also enabled more than 20,000 Kaiser Permanente members who were in danger of losing their coverage to continue their care with us by helping them transition to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), or Charitable Health Coverage. By year-end, we were providing care and coverage to more than half a million low-income children and adults who could not afford insurance. We also provided more than $167 million in charity care in our hospitals and clinics through our Medical Financial Assistance program.
In all, our 2009 care and coverage expenditures totaled $1.3 billion, an increase of 33 percent over the previous year.
Strengthening the safety net
Our support for vulnerable populations did not stop at our own walls. We helped improve the health of entire communities by continuing to work with our many safety net partners in community health centers, public hospitals, and local health departments. We provided grants to 378 safety net organizations nationwide.
2009 imposed unprecedented demands on our safety net partners. To help them meet these demands, we increased our financial, technical, and clinical support to more than $61 million, up 65 percent from 2008.
But we did not stop with financial support. As always, when our researchers and quality experts discover innovative approaches to health care delivery, we share this knowledge with our safety net partners. One of those learnings was a simple and inexpensive heart health medication that has been proven to prevent thousands of heart attacks and strokes in Kaiser Permanente members. Last year, we extended that protocol to more than 7,000 diabetic patients who access care through safety net organizations. We also worked with national partners to create the Patient Safety Initiative, which will help ensure safe, high-quality care for low-income people served by safety net providers.
Go to Healthy People chapter
Foundations for healthy communities
Every aspect of our communities has an impact on health, from the quality of the food available to the quality of the air we breathe, from the safety of the neighborhood parks to the condition of our sidewalks, hiking paths, and transportation networks. Through our Community Health Initiatives, we have been working to make every aspect of our environment safe and healthy. Those initiatives began with our Healthy Eating Active Living (HEAL) programs, which have been our response to the nation’s obesity crisis. In 2009, the need to promote healthy eating in hard times became more pressing, and we responded by redoubling our efforts in support of food banks and nutrition programs, and by working to ensure that healthy foods were available in low-income neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.
Practicing environmental stewardship
Promoting healthy environments also means building greener hospitals, reducing waste, finding new ways to conserve energy, and promoting the use of safer products and materials. In 2009, we focused on four areas that would have the greatest impact on health: safe chemicals, climate action, waste reduction, and access to healthy food. In each area, we have begun to achieve measurable successes.
Go to Healthy Environments chapter
Developing and sharing our expertise, learnings, and skills
One of the most important ways we improve the health of our members and the communities we serve is by creating new knowledge through research, translating it into clinical practice, and sharing it throughout the world. For more than 60 years, our research centers have made discoveries that have saved lives and improved care for people the world over. In 2009 alone, our investigators conducted more than 3,500 research and evaluation studies and published almost 800 journal articles.
To help meet the national demand for comparative effectiveness research, in 2009 we established The Center for Evaluation and Safety Research. CESR will leverage the vast amounts of clinical data provided by our electronic health record system to help us determine the effectiveness of new drugs, medical devices, and therapeutic practices so that clinicians and patients will have the best information available when confronted by hard decisions. CESR will also share that information with researchers and practitioners around the world so that everyone can benefit from reliable, evidence-based data on what works best and most efficiently to produce healthy outcomes.
One measure of the size and quality of our research operations is the fact that, in 2009, the National Institutes of Health awarded us more than $54 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) grants to conduct health research in 22 separate areas.
Educating the health care professionals of the future
Last year, we invested more than $81 million to educate health care professionals across our regions. In all, we trained more than 8,400 interns, medical students, nurses, pharmacists, and other health professionals.
In partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, we announced the Kaiser Permanente Public Health Scholars Program, an ambitious initiative designed to meet the growing need for well-trained public health workers.
Go to New Health Knowledge chapter
