Kaiser Permanente Sets the Standard with Top 4-Star Rating on California’s Annual Clinical-Quality Report Card

Kaiser Permanente Northern and Southern California are the only health care plans to receive the highest score from the Office of the Patient Advocate

For the fifth straight year, Kaiser Permanente is the only health plan in California to earn a 4-star rating — the highest possible — for overall quality of care in the annual Healthcare Quality Report Card from the California Office of the Patient Advocate.

Kaiser Permanente in both Northern and Southern California also received 4 stars in the “Patients Rate their HMO” category, which measures members’ satisfaction with their total care and service.

The 2013 report card (online at http://reportcard.opa.ca.gov/rc2013/hmorating.aspx) provides California consumers with side-by-side comparisons of the largest health plans in the state (10 HMOs and six PPOs), ranking them on national standard-of-care measures that involve treatment  and prevention of a range of acute and chronic conditions with significant implications for personal health.

“As we have throughout our history, Kaiser Permanente continues to innovate, transform and lead in changing times,” said Gregory A. Adams, president of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals/Health Plan Inc., in Northern California. “Our quality initiatives are being held up as a model and replicated by others around the country. The work we are doing is not only saving and improving lives, it is also resulting in shorter and less frequent hospital stays for our patients and in many cases preventing hospitalizations entirely.”

This year, Kaiser Permanente in Northern California earned four stars in all nine of the report-card categories for clinical care, including asthma and lung care, cancer screening, diabetes care, heart care, maternity care, mental-heath care, and “getting the right care” for both adults and children.

“Our physicians, nurses and staff provide care that is personalized, technologically advanced and closely coordinated across both inpatient and outpatient settings. The gap between the excellence of care we provide and the rest of medicine is growing year by year. As a result, Kaiser Permanente members in Northern California have lower mortality rates from heart attacks and strokes than the rest of the country, and our cancer-screening and sepsis-prevention efforts are looked to as models nationally,” said Robert Pearl, MD, executive director and CEO of The Permanente Medical Group.

The 2013 report card has been redesigned by OPA to make navigation easier. Wording in the report was also changed to make it more clear to consumers what specifically was being measured. Since last year, the National Committee for Quality Assurance, the premier organization measuring the performance of health-care providers in the U.S., has been a partner with OPA in developing the annual report card in California.

The 2013 OPA ratings follow several other recent honors received by Kaiser Permanente: 

• Kaiser Permanente’s Medicare plans in California received a 5-star rating for 2013, the only health plan in the state to get the top rating and one of only 11 plans in the nation to get a 5-star rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. It was the second straight year Kaiser Permanente in California has received 5 stars.
• Kaiser Permanente Northern California was ranked the top commercial health plan in the state, and 8th-best in the nation of the 474 plans ranked in the National Committee for Quality Assurance’s 2012 survey of health plans in the U.S. In the same survey, Kaiser Permanente Northern California’s Medicare plan was ranked 3rd-best in the nation.
• Ten Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Northern California were named Top Hospitals in 2012 by the Leapfrog Group. Only 93 hospitals in the nation — of more than 1,200 surveyed — received this honor.
• Seventeen Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Northern California received “A” grades in The Leapfrog Group’s 2012 Safety Scores.
• Ten Kaiser Permanente hospitals in Northern California were ranked as Top Performers in 2012 by The Joint Commission.
• Kaiser Permanente members rated the organization’s health plan highest in member satisfaction in California for the sixth consecutive year in the 2013 U.S. Member Health Plan study by J.D. Power and Associates.