Focus Feature: 2021 Annual Report
Trailblazers: Transforming the boundaries of medicine
The Department of Research & Evaluation 2021 Annual Report celebrates the trailblazers at Kaiser Permanente Southern California who are transforming the boundaries of medicine. Read about patient trailblazers who paved the way for medical discoveries, physician trailblazers who are improving health care for patients, and researcher trailblazers whose findings added to the world’s knowledge about COVID-19 and many other health conditions. The report highlights significant research findings, new funding awards, important clinical trials, investigators’ research interests, and a list of 575 journal articles published in 2021.
R&E News and Features
Patients are pivotal in COVID-19 vaccine research
One of the most remarkable achievements during the pandemic has been the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. This could not have been achieved without the willingness of people around the world to volunteer for vaccine clinical trials.
R&E answers key vaccine safety and effectiveness questions
By mid-March 2021, more than 100 million COVID-19 vaccines had been administered in the United States. However, there were still several pressing questions about the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness that our researchers stepped up to answer.
Researchers create text-based platform to monitor vaccine side effects
When COVID-19 vaccines rolled out in early 2021, researchers were interested in collecting data on common side effects. Kaiser Permanente Southern California researchers worked with others to develop a potentially groundbreaking survey tool that would record how people felt in the days after their vaccinations and be able to link responses to their health records.
Exceptional collaboration tracks emerging variants in real time
While the rollout of new COVID-19 vaccines offered hope in the early months of 2021, the emerging variants raised new questions. How might vaccine effectiveness change for different variants? Recognizing the value of Kaiser Permanente Southern California’s unique potential to track the evolution of coronavirus into new forms, researchers and vaccine makers embarked on a study of COVID-19 variants.
Beyond the virus: Health impacts of the pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, researchers and physicians at Kaiser Permanente Southern California quickly recognized that its effects would reverberate far beyond the novel respiratory illness itself. With that foresight, researchers began to monitor the pandemic’s broader impacts.
Physician trailblazers seek answers to improve their patients’ health
Physician researchers at Kaiser Permanente Southern California are often motivated to pursue research inspired by questions that spring from their daily practices. The questions they seek to answer are as varied as their clinical backgrounds, but they all share one common goal: finding new and better ways to improve their patients’ health.