What does it mean to work in partnership?

It’s a joint commitment to collaborate, enshrined in the Labor Management Partnership’s national agreements.

It’s employees, managers, physicians and dentists building on common interests to make decisions and solve problems.

It’s Kaiser Permanente and the Partnership unions finding creative, mutually beneficial solutions that result in improved care, service and affordability.

There's never been a better time than right now to shine a fresh spotlight on the basics — the team-tested tools and practices fundamental to a strong partnership, such as the Rapid Improvement Model, consensus decision making and interest-based problem solving.

Whether you’re new to partnership or well-versed in its ways, use these performance improvement tools to identify issues, test changes, solve problems, make decisions, deliver better care and service, and enhance your work life.

LMP tools are designed to help you work together when things are going well — and bridge differences when the going gets tough. This approach addresses the needs of union members and helps the organization improve performance — which ultimately benefits Kaiser Permanente’s patients, members and communities.

Will robots replace our jobs?

As technology rapidly reshapes work, the future may be scary, but it’s also filled with opportunities, especially in health care. Kaiser Permanente workers can stay ahead by continuing to learn both technical skills and human skills such as communication and problem-solving, experts say.

“Cultivating our uniquely human skills may be the best way to prepare for an uncertain future,” says Michelle Weise, chief innovation officer at Strada Institute for the Future of Work.

“Don’t be a bad robot. Be a good human being,” says Benjamin Pring, director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. “We don’t want to see a robot doctor. We don’t want to see a robot nurse. A lot of (future) jobs are caring jobs where we want to have the human touch.”

Weise and Pring headlined events in November and December in the Future Ready Workforce of the Future Thought Leader Series. The webcast series, sponsored by the Labor Management Partnership and presented by National Workforce Planning and Development, aims to help prepare Kaiser Permanente’s workforce for tomorrow’s jobs.

“We want to ensure our employees have the skills necessary for the jobs of the future,” says Jessica Butz, co-director of the Partnership-supported Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust.

The goal is to build on record usage for Kaiser Permanente’s tuition reimbursement and 2 Partnership-supported education trusts and have employees continuously skill up to meet changing work needs.

Building skills

“It’s a skills-based world that we live in,” Weise says. “For so many learners, a degree is a bridge too far. They just need to survive and get their foot in the door in a job that pays well.”

Today, 44 million adult Americans lack a college degree, don’t earn a living wage and face being left behind by the future of work, according to a Strada report.

“We’re going to need to reimagine education as much more like a variety of highways with lots of on- and off-ramps,” Weise says. “Sometimes when we’re skilling up, it’s going to be for technical expertise or digital fluency. Sometimes it’s going to be for a broadening of human skills.”

Jobs of the future

Pring also is optimistic.

“We think in the future there will be net job increases,” Pring says. “They’ll just be different jobs.”

These new jobs, highlighted in Cognizant’s “21 Jobs of the Future“ and “21 More Jobs of the Future” reports, include fitness commitment counselor and artificial intelligence-assisted health care technician.

As work changes, technology will enhance most jobs and create new opportunities.

“The only way to deal with disruption is to be proactive,” Pring says. “Invent your own future rather than allow the future to happen to you.”

Who knew bubble wrap envelopes could help patients sleep better at night?

That’s what the Sleep Medicine team in Falls Church, Virginia, discovered when it purchased padded envelopes and a postage machine and launched a service that allows patients to receive — and return — sleep therapy supplies by mail. Thanks to the team’s new approach, patient complaints about supplies dropped from multiple times a week to zero in 3 months between February and May 2019.

“Our patient satisfaction has really gone up. No complaints,” says Danielle Long, sleep apnea coordinator and the team’s labor co-lead who is an OPEIU Local 2 member.

This effort to fix a broken process is a powerful example of how management and labor can work together to improve service, access and affordability.

“Every single one of us contributed to making the workflow easier,” says Alireza Mallah, sleep apnea coordinator and a member of OPEIU Local 2.

Not ‘user-friendly’

Most patients seen by the team suffer from sleep apnea, a condition in which breathing is often blocked or partly blocked during sleep. To detect sleep apnea, patients wear a portable monitoring device. Treatment involves using a machine that delivers air pressure through a mask while sleeping.

As a service to patients, clinic staff arranged for members to pick up the sleep study devices and respiratory supplies at one of 10 medical office buildings in the area.

But patients sometimes were slow to retrieve the equipment and supplies, which caused storage problems. At other times, supplies were incorrect, late, or missing — frustrating patients and staff. And because the team relied on in-house couriers to make the deliveries, there was no way to track items, causing waste.

“It wasn’t a user-friendly process,” explains George Sweat, the team’s management co-lead and director of Medical Specialities. “There was no reliable system for supplies to get from point A to point B, and some members would get duplicate supplies because we had no way of tracking them.”

The breakthrough

“Why don’t we mail these supplies?” team members wondered aloud. But without guidance or goals, the talk remained just that: talk. Solutions seemed like a “myth to everybody,” Mallah recalls.

Then Sweat arrived in March 2018 with a fresh perspective and a zeal for data.

“The breakthrough was looking at the numbers,” says Sweat, who discovered that 25 sleep study devices were lost in 2018, totaling $120,000 — money the team could have saved or spent elsewhere.

He shared his findings with the team and helped set goals to mail all supplies by June 2019 and reduce the annual cost of respiratory supplies by 20 percent. Along the way, they would survey patients to see if their efforts improved member satisfaction.

Continuous improvement

Using the Plan-Do-Study-Act model, the team started out with small tests of change. Team members bought a postage machine that enables them to track shipments and experimented with different envelopes.

“For the first week or two, it was a little rocky,” explains Long. “We started out slowly.”

Now the team mails most supplies to patients, who have the option of picking up and dropping off equipment at the Falls Church location. The team also streamlined the inventory of respiratory supplies, eliminated the use of couriers, centralized distribution of equipment, and introduced paperless billing.

“We’re capturing 100 percent of the revenue,” says Sweat, who estimates the department has saved more than $111,000 in the first four months of 2019, putting it on track to meet its financial goal.  

Best place to work and receive care

The team’s process improvements also benefit patients by increasing access and member satisfaction.

Because patients can return the sleep study devices by mail quickly, staff can put the equipment back into circulation faster, enabling providers to diagnose patients within days instead of weeks.

Patients are happier, too. As of August 2019, 96 percent of patients surveyed said they prefer receiving their supplies by mail rather than traveling to pick them up.

What’s more, team members say performance improvement has made their work lives easier. “I don’t have to work as hard to satisfy my patients,” says Mallah.