Get The Kaiser Permanente

Kaiser Permanente is one of America's leading health care providers and nonprofit health plans. Our health plan finances the care delivered by the more than 24,605 physicians of the Permanente Medical Groups, 73,618 nurses, and 75,000 allied health professionals in our 40 hospitals and 618 medical facilities.

The name Permanente came from Permanente Creek, which flowed past Henry Kaiser's Kaiser Permanente Cement Plant on Black Mountain in Cupertino, California. Kaiser's first wife, Bess Fosburgh, liked the name.

With Kaiser, many members like the fact that everything is in one location. They don't have to bounce from doctor to doctor. Tied in with this is the fact that Kaiser is able to coordinate health care among different doctors, labs, etc. To round this out, a person's health history and notes are all centralized.

Kaiser is fully integrated -- meaning they are not just your insurance company, they also own the hospital you go to, the doctor that treats you is on their payroll, and the run the facility where you go to get an X-ray.

Garfield, MD, and industrialist Henry J. Kaiser became leading visionaries and pioneers in this new generation. They co-founded Kaiser Permanente in 1945 and introduced a revolutionary health care model. One that integrated preventive and evidence-based care with ultramodern technology.

Ohio is a long way from its main operations in California, the Pacific Northwest and the mid-Atlantic region, so it appears Kaiser has decided to focus on areas where opportunities for success are more robust. Chairman and CEO George Halvorson is leaving those posts later this year.

The report, by Mark Roberts, M.D., chief of medicine at Kaiser's Vallejo Medical Center, said many physicians are leaving Kaiser for "less demanding jobs" elsewhere or cutting back on their Kaiser work schedules, resulting in a 13 percent turnover rate over the last two to three years.