After making us wait three hours, Kaiser showed up at bargaining yesterday at 1 p.m. to present us with their onerous proposals on provider profiles. Not only did they reject our proposal on workload distribution, provider profiles and patient care in its entirety, they proposed turning back the clock and restricting the clinical autonomy of providers by:
- Allowing management to book into Indirect Patient Care (IPC) time at will, without restriction, and also determine when IPC time is scheduled
- Eliminating group preparation and charting time
- Using IPC time for case consultation meetings and required trainings
- Eliminating new to return ratios, with no mechanism to ensure return access is adequate
Management is labeling their proposal, which would effectively eliminate IPC, as “Patient Care Time Improvement.” They claim the current contract provisions are too restrictive and do not give them the flexibility they need to meet timely access requirements. However, their proposal, unlike ours, contains no language that commits them to following parity laws or honoring clinical judgment of providers or offering evidence-based treatment. When we pressed them about this, they said they did not need our help to adhere to the law.
To add insult to injury, Kaiser management is completely repudiating the idea of having any sort of collaborative relationship with us. Not only is KP proposing to eliminate the “collaborative” Model of Care (MOC) committee (while we proposed making it more collaborative), it is proposing that management would have complete freedom to change the model of care for behavioral health without absolutely no input from those who do the work.
Their proposal also eliminates contractual provisions that favor hiring internal staff over using external network providers and adds language that would make it easier for Kaiser to lay off our members.
