What's a Life Worth

"What's a Life Worth?"...

On Tuesday, October 4th, our Antelope Valley Service Area Medical Director, Dr. David Kohl, posed this question in two back to back sessions to 600 staff and physician's.  When he feels rushed when seeing a patient he reminds himself to slow down by asking "What's a life worth?".  When he has a support person that says "I have all of this other stuff to do, I'm just going to skip this particular care gap", he them that each step could mean saving someone's life.  To the patient who says they don't have time to exercise or go get their labs done he asks"What's YOUR life worth?"  "Not just to you, but to those that love you?"

The underlying theme of this conference was "Caring for Ourselves, Caring for Our Members".  Notice that Caring for Ourselves was mentioned before Caring for our Members?  The intention was to drive home the message that each one of our employees is also a member and we will only be able to care for our members to the best of our ability if we have first taken care of ourselves. 

I was asked to present on Complete Care along with three of my partners from our Regional Complete Care Leadership team. To kick off our Complete Care presentation, Dr. Phil Tuso gave an overview of the Health Index of California and, more specifically, Antelope Valley.  He then shared a personal story of his own health challenges and the steps he took to take better care of himself, earning a heartwarming round of applause from those in attendance.

Dr. Tim Ho then captured the audience by asking if anyone knew the significance of the number 100,420.  Surprisingly, there was someone in the crowd that knew exactly what it was.  100,420 is the number of members in Antelope Valley.  The number of "people" or "lives" that these two medical offices keep healthy.  He then asked everyone why it was that they thought Kaiser Permanente SCAL was able to achieve #2 status for Medicare and #12 status for Commercial groups on the most recent NCQA rankings.  A few people said "HealthConnect", to which Tim explained that HealthConnect is actually an Epic product that many other successful hospitals use, but they didn't make it to #2 or #12.  Another person said "integration".  "You would think integration would be the reason, but their are other networks like Geisinger and Group Health who weren't #2 or #12."  "The key to our success in Southern California is YOU.  The people who know the importance of caring for a life.  Together, you care for each and every one of the 100,420 people who put their trust in you.  YOU make the difference.  How we care for those patients is what we call Complete Care."  Tim used the following slides to explain what Complete Care is.

If Complete Care was a puzzle, it wouldn't be a piece of the puzzle, but a way to put the puzzle together.

Complete Care is not a bunch of dots or dashes, but a way to put the connect the dots and dashes.

Complete Care is the CULTURE for how we care for each and every one of our KP Members.

Ruthie Goldberg, my partner in crime over Regional Outreach, and I then took over the presentation and gave examples of teams, functions, departments, and processes that come together to care for all of our 3.5 million SCAL members. 

We shared success patient stories and videos that reiterated the importance of the work we do at Kaiser Permanente.  The work THEY do.  We explained that some people work behind the scenes and some work on the front line, but that every role is equally important and each of us has the power to lead from where we stand, starting with our own selves.  Because, it's hard to convince our patient's to take care of themselves if we don't value our own health enough to take action. 

I want to thank the Antelope Valley leadership team for allowing us to participate in such an inspiring event and the staff for sharing their story boards on what each of their teams do to care for our members as well as themselves. 

What's a life worth???  It's PRICELESS

You can see some of those story boards below.