Lessons in Leadership for Improvement: Kaiser Permanente’s Improvement Journey Over 10 Years
Kaiser Permanente has achieved impressive improvements in quality of care over a decade — a testament to their engaged and effective leadership and staff, and also due in part to a unique 10-plus-year collaboration with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.
Lessons in Leadership for Improvement: Kaiser Permanente’s Improvement Journey Over 10 Years. Cambridge, MA: Institute for Healthcare Improvement; April 2016. (Available at ihi.org)
Over a decade, Kaiser Permanente (KP) has achieved impressive improvements in quality of care — halving its hospital standardized mortality ratio and reducing hospital-acquired pressure ulcers by more than 80 percent, among other achievements. These accomplishments are all the more remarkable for the size and complexity of the organization in which they occurred, and a testament to what can be accomplished in health care with engaged and effective leadership and staff. Kaiser's achievements also owe a great deal to a unique 10-plus-year collaboration with IHI — a Strategic Partnership that accelerated improvement at KP, greatly informed IHI’s own learning, and helped KP build system-wide capacity for improvement.