Innovation Snapshot: Ray Nanda, MD

Helping Every Individual Achieve Total Health

This is a special series hearing from the voices of our Permanente physicians on how they bring innovation into their practice to support Permanente Medicine.

By Ray Nanda, MD

Lineage, personality, and environment may shape you, but they do not define your full potential.
― Mollie Marti

Who am I?

I have many roles in life, none more important than being a dad to my two precious girls, Megha and Maya, and raising them to be resilient, righteous, and deeply caring about the world they inherit from us. I’m also husband to a wonderful wife, son to fantastic parents who immigrated here 50 years ago to offer their children better opportunities, and a proud Permanente physician.

What do I do for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group?

Leadership is liquid. I manage — and try with all my might to inspire — a full, bilingual panel of family medicine patients to better health for themselves, their families, and their communities. I am also the physician lead for the Center for Healthy Living — a department dedicated to supporting our patients (and taking the load off of our physicians’ broad shoulders, bless them) with a smorgasbord of tools to help them manage their own health.

Whether it’s an in-person group program for diabetics to affect real, practical, and long-lasting change or a phone coaching program to help our patients break the shackles of nicotine addiction, start moving, or eat just one more vegetable a day, everything we do is evidence-based medicine. We have clinical outcomes we hold our programs accountable to, so that we serve the global need of changing the health of a population — beginning with positive behavior changes at the individual level.

I am also an elected member of the board of directors for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group and am proud to help guide and shape what Permanente Medicine looks like today and what it will look like in 10 years. I’m doing everything I can to make sure that in 50 years — as we navigate through as yet unforeseen changes and challenges and opportunities in the landscape of health care — our core values of Permanente Medicine are a constant, unwavering North Star for us.

How’s it going?

Ask my kids. Check my exercise log. Inquire with a few patients whose lives have been touched and changed by the Center for Healthy Living. Habla con una de mis pacientes. Talk to the Permanente physician partners that I represent. My hope is that they would all answer the same way, which is that I’ve been doing exactly what I said I was going to do since Day 1 with Permanente — try to leave this place a little better off than how I found it. That’s all I ever wanted.

Ray Nanda, MD, is a family medicine physician in Orange County for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group, which provides care to Kaiser Permanente members in Southern California. Dr. Nanda is also physician lead of the Center for Healthy Living, whose work is on display at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Total Health in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter at @KPOCThriveMD.