We live in an increasingly diverse world. Our own country is becoming more diverse every single day. As we become more diverse, one of the sad, unspoken issues for the health care industry is the fact that a large majority of the uninsured in America are from our minority populations. Kaiser Permanente has been actively dealing with issues of health disparities for a very long time. We hired women physicians and physicians of color during the pre-civil rights era. We provided medical care in racially integrated facilities when racial segregation was the prevailing societal practice. I personally love diversity. Being in a world of multiple cultures, multiple ethnicities, multiple alignments and multiple points of views is exciting, energizing, and constantly intellectually challenging, growth-provoking and rewarding. There is an energy and creativity that results from diverse perspectives, diverse points of view, diverse life experiences, and diverse skill sets that can achieve the kind of interactive synergy where the whole is very much greater than the sum of its parts. I often tell people that diversity is part of Kaiser Permanente’s fabric and is fully integrated into how we do business. Kaiser Permanente is a diverse place to work. Our overall work force is so diverse that we actually don’t have any ethnic or racial majority inside Kaiser Permanente – women and people of color comprise 74 percent and 54 percent, respectively, of the total Kaiser Permanente workforce.

Our Board of Directors – often cited as being among the most racially and gender diverse boards of major corporations in America – is a composition of 36 percent women and 50 percent people of color, two of whom are Latino. Nearly 30,000 employees – 16 percent of our total workforce – is Latino. This includes caregivers and multiple positions across our organization – legal, government relations, public affairs, compliance, IT, finance, and, of course, our national diversity department. We have a rich history of diversity firsts in the health care industry. Today we have sustained efforts to integrate diversity into every aspect of our day-to-day operations. Since 1991, we have supported multicultural staff associations. Kaiser Permanente’s Latino Staff Association is a critical part of our organization’s diversity infrastructure and cultural expertise. The KPLA is involved in national and state-wide organizations dedicated to Latino employee recruitment and retention, leadership, employee diversity and enhancing the quality of Kaiser Permanente’s care to Latinos. The mission of the KPLA is to attract, inspire, support, and retain Latinos to achieve their full potential at all levels within our organization. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars of business with thousands of small, minority, women and veteran-owned businesses and have internal goals in place to continually increase the number of these businesses that we work with. It strengthens our communities to have a thriving and diverse economic infrastructure. It makes for a stronger America and a better economic environment when we deliberately and strategically channel purchases to these suppliers who might not otherwise — based on size or scale — come to our attention. We have been hosting annual diversity conferences for over three decades. These conferences highlight diversity as a core value and key business strategy for Kaiser Permanente. Our diversity conference brings together hundreds of people every year to deal with issues of cultural competence, ethnic health issues, and care disparities. My own sense is that if we can make a difference in helping people understand the issues, that understanding could help people solve the issues. Kaiser Permanente is a continuous learning organization. One of the best ways to learn is to invest in diversity in our workforce and our communities – this ultimately helps us focus on providing culturally competent care to all of our members and patients. By George C. Halvorson, chairman and chief executive officer of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals headquartered in Oakland, California.