Data-driven Health Care at Kaiser

Kaiser Permanente is a not-for-profit healthcare provider founded in 1945. Kaiser's 200,000+ employees serve more than 12 million members nationwide.

Challenge

A physical therapy department in a Kaiser hospital wanted to make more data-driven decisions. They knew their profession relied on numerous tests that could be performed in with patients in the hospital rooms and corridors. But, the tests had multiple steps and varying scoring systems. It's too much for a therapist to perform from memory. Carrying a reference book or text book around the hospital is not practical.

The challenge: to create a set of field references that therapists could take with them throughout the hospital to enable data gathering.

Solution

When interviewing the therapists about their needs, the elements of content strategy emerged:

• Documentation must be portable, either easy to carry or fits in the pocket of a lab coat.
• Documentation needed to stand up to daily use and handling in a hospital in-patient environment.
• Document needed to contain all the necessary information to generate patient test scores in the field.

With these criteria in place and armed with the full description of various PT tests, I created a document set consisting of

• one pocket guide containing several common tests.
• three single-sheet references for test too complex to fit in the pocket guide.