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Advancing health equity

To be truly healthy, employees need access to equitable health care and comprehensive social health support. Offering these workforce health essentials can help you attract and retain a diverse team, boost employee engagement, and lower your health care costs. By partnering with a leader in both health equity and social health, you can give your business a powerful competitive edge.

Leveraging data to identify disparities and enable better care

Measuring health outcomes by race and ethnicity gives us valuable data — and when that data reveals disparities between people of different demographics, we close those gaps through targeted outreach, culturally responsive care, and meaningful steps to improve clinical performance to better serve our diverse members.

We have complete race, ethnicity, and language data on 82% of our members and counting. Outside Kaiser Permanente, just 24% of commercial health plans have complete race data on their members, and a mere 6% have complete ethnicity data.2 And fewer than one-third of non Kaiser Permanente hospitals that do collect this data are proactively using it to help improve care delivery.3

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Find the right plan for your diverse workforce
877-305-7933

Social health is a vital sign. Is your health plan screening for it?

Good health requires more than just good health care. Social and economic factors have a big impact on employee health — and on your business’s bottom line. In fact, employees with unmet social needs are more than twice as likely to skip needed health care, and to miss 6 or more workdays per year.5 They’re also 6 times more likely to report poor mental health.6 Shockingly, 44% of employees report at least one unmet social need.7

Social and economic factors have the highest impact on health

What determines an employee’s total health?8

  • 40% social and economic factors
  • 30% health behaviors
  • 20% clinical care
  • 10% physical environment
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Using social health as a measure of total health

Kaiser Permanente’s rich data and connected, team-based care model help us identify social health needs and develop initiatives that address the areas where we can make the greatest impact. To date, we’ve screened more than 2.14 million members for social needs, and plan to screen the rest by 2025. These screenings enable us to deliver more personalized treatment, and connect members to the social health resources they need — both within our system and out in the community.

Choose a health plan devoted to eliminating inequities and disparities

In addition to delivering equitable care and integrated clinical and social health support, we’ll also help you implement wellness solutions to address these issues head-on — and empower each employee to be as healthy as they
can possibly be.

Find the right plan for your diverse team
877-305-7933

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  • Cooper et al., American Journal of Managed Care, May 13, 2021. Data is from our Southern California region, compared with other California hospitals.

  • Rachel Harrington et al., “A New Effort to Address Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Care Through Quality Measurement,” Health Affairs Blog, September 9, 2021.

  • “Health Equity Snapshot, a Toolkit for Action,” Institute for Diversity and Health Equity, American Hospital Association, December 2020.

  • Kaiser Permanente Equitable Care Health Outcomes (ECHO) Report, Q4 2022, accessed October 2, 2023; NCQA Quality Compass, 2022.

  • Jenny Cordina et al., “Income Alone May Be Insufficient: How Employers Can Help Advance Health Equity in the Workplace,” McKinsey & Company, December 3, 2021.

  • Erica Hutchins Coe et al., “Insights from McKinsey’s Consumer Social Determinants of Health Survey,” McKinsey & Company, April 30, 2019.

  • Erica Hutchins Coe et al., “Understanding the Impact of Unmet Social Needs on Consumer Health and Healthcare,” McKinsey & Company, February 20, 2020.

  • The University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, 2022, www.countyhealthrankings.org.

  • Zachary Pruitt et al., “Expenditure Reductions Associated with a Social Service Referral Program,” Population Health Management, December 2018.