998-99 Strategic Planning Alternative and Complementary Medicine Transpersonal Phenomena

The Permanente Journal /Spring 1998/Volume 2 No. 2 Tom Janisse, MD, Editor-in-Chief 1998-99 Strategic Planning The Editorial Team and members of the Advisory Board of The Permanente Journal met in February for 1998-99 strategic planning. Although the group discussed many subjects in detail, I would like to highlight three important strategic intents. Our work first focused on review of the Journal’s mission statement. We asked, “Did the original statement adequately speak to our mission on the basis of what we learned in our first year of publication?” and “Could we enhance or clarify our mission?” While we did confirm our mission, we also sharpened the language to reflect the growing understanding of “Permanente Practice” subsequent to the formation of the Permanente Federation and the significant number of interactions now occurring among clinicians across the country. Our revised mission statement reads: “The Permanente Journal is written and published by the clinicians of the Permanente Medical Groups and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan to promote the delivery of superior health care through the principles and benefits of Permanente Medicine.” This commits the Journal to superior health care— the first phase of our national brand strategy and promise to members, and identifies the major strategic capability to accomplish this—“Permanente Medicine.” The second strategic focus was our primary audience and customers—the clinicians of Kaiser Permanente (KP). One of our attempts to understand clinician needs will be through the reader survey you will find in this issue. Please respond and help us bring you the value you seek when you hold the Journal, view it, and read it. Our third strategic focus was to better understand and improve the key routine business processes for a medical journal: the performance of our editorial team, article generation, peer review process, issue layout and graphics, printing, distribution channels, and communication with our readers. We will be visiting more of you across the country this year at clinical and research conferences and facility meetings to learn about your successful practices and encourage you to write and submit your best work to your Permanente Journal. In summary, our strategic planning focused on enhancing our core product, ensuring that it continues to define Permanente Medicine and helps to diffuse innovation—those most successful and best practices—into each Region, ultimately improving our care of our members. The cost to do this—for each Region's PMG to support our 1998 budget through allocation based on the number of clinicians in each Region—will be $9.02 per copy. Alternative and Complementary Medicine Alternative and complementary medicine suddenly appeared in the awareness of those in traditional medicine in 1993 with David Eisenberg's finding that one third of American people use some type of “alternative” medicine. Permanente clinicians exhibit a high interest in this area through their questions, attendance at educational sessions, incorporation of alternatives into their practice, and even development of integrative alternative medicine programs. Lydia Segal, from the MidAtlantic PMG, who authors an article in this issue, is developing an integrative program after more than a year of exploration, analysis, and the creation of a business case. When planning The Permanente Journal in 1996, we convened KP focus groups to assess the needs of Permanente physicians. These groups said the Journal is where they would look for information on alternative medicine. The publication of this article addresses that recommendation.