Briar Ertz-Berger, MD, MPH, is an emergency medicine physician and the Director of Special Populations for Northwest Permanente. Dr. Ertz-Berger’s work focuses on eliminating health inequities and the effects of unmitigated socio-economic struggles. Her passion for this work started with serving patients in the Bronx during medical school and continued at OHSU during her residency and subsequent research fellowship where she studied the impact of Medicaid cuts on emergency room utilization.

Now at Kaiser Permanente Northwest (KPNW), Dr. Ertz-Berger is leading work to improve health outcomes for KPNW members and the surrounding community through a robust Social Health program, which includes the development an Oregon-wide integrated health and social care network.

Northwest Permanente administrative staff member Nicole Friedman is zealous about her work — and that zeal is paying off, for all of Kaiser Permanente Northwest and beyond.

In early June, Kaiser Permanente announced that it would embark on a groundbreaking initiative to connect our patients to the social services they need. Called Thrive Local, the program builds on Nicole’s work to make social needs screening a routine part of delivering quality patient care.

Thrive Local will be the first program of its kind to address social needs at scale, with a robust searchable directory of community organizations and public agencies embedded directly in Health Connect. Clinicians not only will be able to make referrals but also receive information about our patients from those organizations in a closed-loop referral process.

And in part because of Nicole’s work alongside Briar Ertz-Berger, MD, NWP Assistant Director of Operations: Special Populations, KPNW will be the first region to deploy Thrive Local. This work has been Nicole’s focus since she joined the company in early 2018, and now she serves as the operational lead for Thrive Local. In this role, Nicole is accountable for an enterprise shared strategy and solution across Kaiser Permanente to address social and non-medical needs. She divides her time between Northwest Permanente and KP’s program office.

Broadly speaking, as the regional administrator for continuum, complex, and community care, Nicole is responsible for execution and oversight of programs that address complex medical, behavioral and social needs to improve health outcomes and reduce cost of care for vulnerable populations. Prior to her current role, Nicole worked for KPNW, where she was responsible for developing and spreading a patient navigator program. In designing the program for the Northwest Region, Nicole became the first navigator at Kaiser Permanente. She serves on the steering committee for Social Needs Network for Evaluation and Translation (SONNET) and serves on the National Quality Forum, Person and Family Centered Care Committee.

Nicole earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon in anthropology and Portuguese, and a master’s in Applied Medical Anthropology. Formerly, she had a joint appointment with the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research as a clinical investigator, focusing on interventions that address socio-economic barriers to care and reduce health disparities. She received the KPNW Faces of Change award for eliminating social barriers to care. Nicole thrives by running, cross-fit, hiking, and cooking. She also loves spending time with her two dogs, Goose and Goblin, and her husband.

Tim Ho is Regional Assistant Medical Director for Quality and Complete Care at Kaiser Permanente, Southern California. The vision of Complete Care is to support care that is safe, effective, efficient, equitable, timely and patient-centered for the people and communities that Kaiser Permanente serves in Southern California. Complete Care accomplishes this by utilizing a wide span of impact within the framework of a matrix or networked organization. Examples of areas that Complete Care impact are: performance reporting, chronic disease management, and clinical decision support.

Tim graduated with his medical degree from Loma Linda University, School of Medicine in 1992 and has been with Kaiser Permanente since 1997 as a family physician. He earned his Masters in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014.