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Getting Personal to Improve Patient Care guy.x.ashley Fri, 08/04/2023 - 11:57
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Teams collect patient demographic information
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Long Teaser

Teams across KP are gathering patient demographic data to identify and address their unique health care needs.

Story body part 1

Jenna Li and Autum Tomlin serve in different specialties at opposite ends of the country. Yet each plays a central part in efforts to harness patient data to improve care and eliminate health disparities at Kaiser Permanente.

Li is a chemical dependency counselor with the Mid-Valley Addiction Medicine team in Salem, Oregon. Members of her unit-based team, represented by Alliance-affiliated unions, make standard practice of asking patients about their sexual orientation, gender identity and preferred pronouns.

Tomlin is an urgent care technician at Reston Medical Center in Virginia. She and her team – represented by Alliance- and Coalition-affiliated unions – collect information about patients’ race, ethnicity, and preferred language. She has seen, first-hand, the power of speaking to patients in words they can understand.

“Usually, you can see the patient is at ease and feels a sense of relief that they are able to communicate in their preferred language,” says Tomlin, the team’s labor co-lead and a member of OPEIU Local 2, part of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.

Like others across the organization, the Level 5 unit-based teams are seeking to address disparities in health and access to quality care that persist across a range of dimensions – including race, language, gender, and sexual orientation. By asking patients about their backgrounds in a safe, respectful, and compassionate way, the teams are changing how they deliver care and service to members – and relate to one another.

“The effort is minimal, and the effectiveness can be really high when we help a patient feel seen and understood,” says Li, labor co-lead for the Mid-Valley team and a member of OFNHP Local 5017, part of the Alliance of Health Care Unions.

Making members feel welcome

To better understand patients’ health risks and needs, the Mid-Valley team began asking members about their sexual orientation and gender information. They asked the questions during the intake assessment and entered patients’ responses into their electronic health records, making important background information available to all KP providers.

The practice is already changing how the Northwest team delivers care to LGBTQ+ patients.

For instance, Mid-Valley is referring more members to a weekly group therapy session for LGBTQ+ patients to discuss their unique challenges. Misunderstandings about sexual orientation or gender identity are among the obstacles such patients face in accessing effective care. They also are at elevated risk from health threats including alcohol and substance abuse.

Recently, the team hustled to track down a teen-ager in crisis who had fled their clinic’s waiting room. Knowing the teen identified as nonbinary, staff members convinced them to return after expressing sensitivity to their fears and addressing them with their preferred pronouns.

Gestures to support these patients are especially important because they come to treatment reeling from the “double whammy” of stigmatization for their addiction struggles and LGTBQ+ identity.

“We can do a lot to make a member feel welcome by using language they are open to hearing,” says Carri McCrary, Mid-Valley clinical services manager and the team’s management co-lead.

Communicator (reporters)
Guy Ashley
Editor (if known, reporters)
Sherry Crosby
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not listing only
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Developing
Take Action: Get to Know Your Patients

By asking patients about their backgrounds in a respectful, and compassionate way, teams across Kaiser Permanente are changing how they deliver care and service to members.

Share these resources with your team to improve health equity for everyone:

  • Icebreaker: Intersectionality. Use this activity to connect with your teammates and build empathy and understanding critical for workplace equity.
  • Hank: Equity for All. Find inspiration in this Hank magazine issue featuring frontline teams who are advancing equity for patients and workers.
  • Speaking the Same Language. See how the Urgent Care team from Reston, Virginia, used a simple reminder card to collect patient demographic information.
  • Personalizing Care for Patients. Learn how the Mid-Valley Addiction Medicine team is seeking to better understand the health needs of LGBTQ+ patients.

Hank Winter 2016

Format: PDF

Size: 16 pages; print on 8.5" x 11" paper (for full-size, print on 11" x 14" and trim to 9.5" x 11.5")

Intended audience: Frontline workers, managers and physicians

Best used: Download the PDF or use the links below to read the stories online.

Hank Winter 2016

See the whole issue

From the Desk of Henrietta: Healing a World of Hurt

Deck
Why we need both diversity and inclusion

Story body part 1

Diversity and inclusion. Without both, we each tend to identify with our own clan—be it defined by race, gender, age, economic status, what have you—and all the other clans remain other.

Diversity without inclusion permits an accumulation of biases that leads to a world where, as one recent study showed, minority patients are up to 30 percent less likely to receive pain treatment in emergency rooms than whites, even though they report pain just as frequently. This matters: Pain slows healing and can create new health problems. Sadly, this huge gap in treating pain is just one example in a long list of health disparities linked to cultural biases.

Inclusion—finding what we have in common, appreciating diversity instead of ignoring differences—is key to eliminating disparities and delivering high-quality health care.

As Ron Copeland, MD, Kaiser Permanente’s senior vice president of National Diversity and Inclusion Strategy and Policy, says, “I don’t believe you can have passion for true quality or service excellence without also being genuinely passionate about diversity and inclusion practices. They’re one and the same.”

How do you get good at inclusion? Practice seeing what you have in common with others. The Labor Management Partnership’s unit-based teams—whose membership cuts across all demographics—do this daily as they use interest-based problem solving. As this issue of Hank shows, a natural next step is to address how to deliver the best possible care to all our members.

It takes only one person or one small group to spark meaningful change. Be that person. Be an active member of your team.