Bernard J. Tyson Discusses Kaiser Permanente's Emerging New Medical School

With the development of Kaiser Permanente’s new medical school comes an emerging philosophy to more directly align medical education with the industry’s current transition to more integrated, holistic approaches to care, said Bernard J. Tyson, chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente.

Transcript (slightly modified):

Kaiser Permanente is now opening its own medical school. How will Kaiser’s experience in integrated care inform how it teaches new physicians?

Well, we’re proud of the medical school that we are designing and building. The purpose is to, in essence, educate the future of medical students on our approach to medical care: team-based care, care that looks holistically at the person, the environment in which they live, working as a team, and having the kind of technology that allows you to make informed decisions about the methods of care and the recommendations of care.

And clearly, a focus on outcomes. What are the results being achieving with the care being delivered? A heavy emphasis on health, and so it’s not intended to be just a sick care model but to talk about how to maintain and keep health. All of those are the exciting concepts that we will have in our medical school program.

How will Kaiser Permanente’s new medical school fit into the new healthcare delivery system and further the delivery of value-based care?

It’s another piece to the puzzle for us. We have always been in medical education. We have a lot of residents who come to our program on a yearly basis but this allows us to go upstream and be a part of the whole teaching of future medical students.

So this allows us to build on medical education but for us at least, equally if not more importantly, to bring our approach into the teaching paradigm and I think that what we will end up with are future physicians who are taught more holistically about the care of populations and individuals.