An eye on innovation to enhance care delivery

The Federation Care Delivery Technology team, alongside the Federation Quality team, jointly created a responsible AI framework for the organization. This framework — focused on patient safety and clinical impact — will be used to evaluate and measure all AI tools used in a clinical setting. Evaluations started with Abridge’s ambient listening technology and have progressed to generative AI features for Kaiser Permanente’s electronic health record, imaging tools, and beyond.

Here’s a look at other care delivery IT projects the Federation supported in 2025:

• California instance simplification (CIS) — The Federation partnered with The Permanente Medical Group, Southern California Permanente Medical Group, and KPIT to successfully consolidate 6 Northern California “instances” in KP HealthConnect into one instance, while simultaneously consolidating 6 Southern California instances into one instance. This effort saves Kaiser Permanente money and time in technical infrastructure and maintenance labor and reduces the organization’s technical complexity within its large electronic health record system, resulting in the ability to adopt more native features within KP HealthConnect that improve clinical quality and workflow efficiencies.
• MyChart and Care Companion— The Federation helped to deliver MyChart Evolution (MCE) to the Mid-Atlantic States, with other markets scheduled to deploy in 2026. Along with MCE, the interactive patient care tool MyChart Care Companion was also delivered to the Mid-Atlantic market for both routine pregnancy care and electronic cancer symptom management. MCE provides patients and care teams with an improved, overall experience and allows Kaiser Permanente to advance our digital toolset for patient engagement and clinical care.
• Enterprise imaging strategy— Work advanced the enterprise imaging strategy by launching the Sectra PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) for Radiology in the Mid-Atlantic States and launching digital pathology pilots in Northern and Southern California. The implementation of this system leads to faster, more accurate diagnoses and delivers workflow efficiencies through a robust, scalable enterprise platform.
• Patient/Provider messaging improvements— Launched Epic’s Automated Response Technology (ART), which leverages generative AI capabilities to reduce the cognitive burden on our physicians and clinicians by improving patient secure messaging workflows. ART provides a draft response to a patient, allowing the clinician to focus on the clinical elements and edit as appropriate. So far, 16,000 clinicians in the Mid-Atlantic States, Washington, and Northern California can use ART. Usage is expected to grow as other markets go live with the MyChart communication center.

The Federation Data & Analytics Team modernized critical elements of our reporting and data tools, enabling uninterrupted reporting, improved KPI automation, and future‑readiness for next‑generation analytics platform transition. Key accomplishments — including CIS code remediation, migration of Dignified Journeys measures to the National Cost Accounting system, and upskilling the analytics team ahead of a planned organizational shift of data and analytics work to a cloud-based platform — advanced alignment with the enterprise IT strategy and ensured stability of the data pipeline.