After the Kaiser vote: The way forward for GHRI

Now that the landmark member vote on Group Health acquisition is in, Dr. Eric B. Larson looks ahead to next steps toward joining Kaiser’s research network.

We just passed a milestone in Group Health history. Last Saturday, our member-elected governing board announced the results of a special vote on Group Health acquisition by Kaiser Permanente. Of eligible member votes received, 85% were in favor of acquisition. So what’s next?

First, thank you to everyone who participated in the vote and everyone at Group Health and Kaiser who worked on negotiations and communications leading to this historic event. The next step is state insurance commission and Federal Trade Commission review. This work may take some time. Meanwhile, Group Health and Group Health Research Institute (GHRI) are looking forward to collaborating with Kaiser on a transition plan. I will be meeting soon with Dawn Loeliger, Group Health executive vice president for strategic planning & development, and others on future planning.

For now, daily operations won’t change much. At GHRI, we’ll continue to excel as a public-interest, mission-driven research institute, diligently pursuing our scientific agenda. In fact, I’m proud that the consistent success of GHRI in practical research that helps people and their families stay healthy is a proven asset we bring to the Kaiser acquisition.

What GHRI contributes to Kaiser

For several reasons, I’ve been reflecting about what makes us a high-performing research institute. Mainly, I want GHRI to continue to be a leading, innovative research enterprise as we join the prestigious, national network of Kaiser research institutes. I’m also reviewing GHRI’s strengths in preparation for our annual Research Advisory Board (RAB) meeting on March 25. I’ll join other Group Health and GHRI leaders in presenting the state of our enterprise to our board of health system experts. This year, our RAB includes Karen Emmons, PhD, vice president for research and director of the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute. My colleague and friend John Steiner, MD, MPH, senior director, Institute for Health Research, Kaiser Permanente Colorado, will be completing his term on our RAB.

I’ll be telling the RAB what GHRI brings to the Kaiser acquisition, for example:

• GHRI is financially sound, with an astounding 42 percent success rate in 2015 for National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding. We’ve diversified our support with awards from industry partners, foundations, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and non-NIH federal agencies.
• GHRI is known for productive collaborations: within our Institute, with the Group Health delivery system, and with external partners, including Kaiser research institutes and other members of the Health Care Systems Research Network.
• We have experience with multisite studies, as primary project leaders and on projects led by others.
• Our specific strengths include a talented, leading-edge biostatistics unit with expertise in big data that are increasingly common in health care research: federal databases, electronic health records, and patient-reported information.
• Our programmers developed a data warehouse system that is the model for similar systems used by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other national agencies.
• Our recent hires strengthen our expertise in electronic health, mobile health, and other ways of connecting with and serving health system members. Our midcareer and senior researchers have internationally recognized programs in community health; drug and alcohol use disorders; preventive measures including behavior change, vaccination, and cancer screening; chronic disease management; and the health of older people, women, and children.
• We bring a productive attitude to our partnerships, with strong morale, a willingness to solve problems, and an expectation of interdisciplinary cooperation.

GHRI is well-positioned to be successful as we join our Kaiser colleagues while retaining our core strengths as researchers.

And what we anticipate from Kaiser

After our presentation to the RAB, I’m looking forward to the informal discussions. We’ll learn more about potential new opportunities such as closer partnership with the Kaiser Permanente Center for Effectiveness and Safety Research (CESR). The CESR multimillion-dollar data infrastructure collects health data with tremendous research potential. We and other CESR users will be using the data to measure the true vital signs of health care performance with a goal of broadly improving care.

I want to emphasize that the overall mission and high performance of GHRI won’t change with the acquisition. We’ll just add our strengths to Kaiser’s larger integrated care, coverage, and research system, which is like Group Health but with a greater national reach. Next month in my newsletter, I’ll report on how our RAB, including our guests from Kaiser, respond to the points I’ve outlined here. I look forward to their input and will tell you what I learned from them. 

Eric B. Larson, MD, MPH
Executive Director, Group Health Research Institute
Vice President for Research, Group Health