Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Health Plan is set to get a new top official in Orange County.
Longtime leader Julie Miller-Phipps is leaving the local operation of the Oakland-based integrated health system to take the helm of one of its statewide operations.
Miller-Phipps, vice president and executive director of Kaiser’s OC operations, was named president of Atlanta-based Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Georgia on Oct. 17. She succeeds Kerry Kohnen, who is retiring.
Miller-Phipps, a 36-year veteran of Kaiser, was traveling and unavailable for comment last week.
Kaiser declined to comment on the process for selecting a successor to Miller-Phipps.
Miller-Phipps has led a service area with 23 medical offices, hospitals in Anaheim and Irvine, about 900 doctors throughout the county in the Permanente Medical Group, and more than 480,000 members.
The alumna of California State University-Fullerton and the University of La Verne joined Kaiser in 1978 and assumed her current position in 2002. She was previously director of hospital operations at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center-Baldwin Park.
Miller-Phipps spent much of her time at Kaiser overseeing the emergence of Kaiser’s hospitals in Irvine and Anaheim.
Kaiser’s $560 million Anaheim hospital opened in 2012 with 262 beds, 16 operating rooms, 24 pediatric beds, and outpatient surgery. It replaced an aging Kaiser hospital on Lakeview Avenue.
The Anaheim location followed the 2008 opening of the centerpiece of Kaiser’s $400 million complex in the Irvine Spectrum, a 150-bed hospital on Sand Canyon Avenue. Kaiser Irvine was the first entirely new hospital built in Orange County since Irvine Regional Hospital and Medical Center (now Hoag Hospital Irvine) opened in 1990.
Second Go
Miller-Phipps told the Business Journal in 2009 that she expected getting Kaiser Anaheim built would be easier than Irvine’s construction because it was her second go at the process.
“There’s a little less anxiety this time about what to expect and what to look for,” she said, adding that Kaiser Anaheim was going to be “for all intents and purposes, an identical copy” of Kaiser Irvine.
“It made sense to really … supersize this hospital” in comparison to Irvine because about 60% of Kaiser’s local members live in North and Central Orange County, Miller-Phipps said in a 2011 interview.
She also had a sense of humor when asked about how much she was involved in Kaiser’s construction projects.
“I feel like I’m in the construction business,” she said at the time. “I should have taken blueprint reading while I was in my graduate program.”
Miller-Phipps, earlier this month, shared her thoughts on how healthcare in Orange County is taking on a more integrated form a la Kaiser. Recent examples include Irvine-based St. Joseph Hoag Health and Vivity, an alliance between Anthem Blue Cross and several Southern California hospital operators, including Fountain Valley-based MemorialCare Health System.
“I’m pleased with it—our community needs it,” Miller-Phipps said.
“The [accountable care organizations] and partnerships are definitely gunning for us. It is all good. The overall health of the community improves.”
‘Business As Usual’
Kaiser has operated in a “business as usual” mode in the wake of other alliances, she said.
“I don’t really expect [our] basic healthcare delivery to change” with the emergence of Vivity and St. Joseph Hoag Health.
Miller-Phipps did say that Vivity and other alliances may lead to Kaiser looking at “things we take for granted” when it comes to marketing and awareness.
She noted that, regardless of the Vivity alliance, integrated care in the reform era requires an adjustment in how business is done. Miller-Phipps also said providers will have to adapt to how insurance payments are changing to emphasize quality and patient outcome rather than just being paid per procedure without regard to either.
She said she expects costs to start dropping for hospitals and providers in the wake of integration moves―industry watchers say reform will cause providers to adjust because lower payments will force them to be more judicious about ordering tests and other services.
