Dear ACT Center colleagues and friends,

With the holiday season upon us, our team at the ACT Center wants to take this opportunity to give thanks for the many partners who make our work possible: the health care leaders, care teams, patients, and communities for whom health and health care are front and center every day. Your ideas, collaboration, and commitment to continuous learning and improvement have given us much to be proud of in 2024! In addition to our latest news, here are few other highlights from our work with Kaiser Permanente Washington and other partners nationwide:

Inclusion was a big theme for us in the past year. Our Integrated Pain Management (IPM) Program team reached new milestones in patient engagement, with our patient partners co-leading a paper describing the benefits of virtual collaboration. Our work on IPM also helped inspire the development of 2 new resources to help research teams prioritize equity and inclusion: the Checklist for Inclusive Communications and the Project Lifecycle Checklist on Integrating Health Equity. And through our many partnerships in the Delta Center for a Thriving Safety Net, we collaborated with grantees nationwide to help improve state policies and practices that support equity in the integration of primary care and behavioral health.

The past year also reminded us of the innovation that’s possible when research and care delivery come together in partnership to improve care. Within Kaiser Permanente Washington, we’ve been thrilled to leverage research to support leaders and care teams in making cervical cancer screening easier for patients. We also had the unique opportunity to engage Family Medicine residents in leading projects to improve blood pressure control and address disparities across different patient groups. And working alongside our partners at Vayu Health in California, we used our research expertise to inform the design of a whole-person program to improve diabetes care for people insured through Medicaid managed care plans.

What matters most, of course, is the impact we make when we come together with a shared goal. Treatment of COVID-19 remains an important priority for health systems everywhere — and with our advanced analytics capabilities, the ACT Center helped Kaiser Permanente Washington rapidly develop and implement evidence-based tools to support COVID-19 treatment decisions. Looking back on our IPM Program, which concludes in 2024 after 4 amazing years, we’re so proud of what we achieved working alongside patients and care teams: public-domain resources written by and for people who live with ongoing pain (available in English and Spanish), as well as guidance to help health systems to design and launch opioid safety committees and to restore trust between patients and clinicians as evidence-based guidelines around opioid safety are implemented. Most importantly, our research so far is pointing to improved prescribing outcomes across clinics and providers in our health system — findings that we’ll be excited to share in an upcoming newsletter in 2025!