Verified
Kaiser Permanente
Experimenting- Healthcare
- 225,854 employees
- 12.9M members
- Abridge ambient AI in 40 hospitals
- VP of AI since 2023
- No AI ROI published
Kaiser Permanente deploys AI mainly inside care delivery: it bought Abridge's ambient documentation tool and made it available in its 40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices in Aug 2024, and its physicians and researchers build their own clinical models, such as the Advance Alert Monitor and the KPIN booking assistant. Vice President Daniel Yang oversees the quality of every AI tool, and Kaiser Permanente publishes clinical results but no financial return from AI.
about.kaiserpermanente.orgTheir approach to AI
- The platform
- Kaiser Permanente bought Abridge's ambient documentation tool for its clinicians in Aug 2024 and builds its own clinical models, such as the Advance Alert Monitor for hospital patients and the KPIN booking assistant for members.
- The models
- Kaiser Permanente names no general-purpose model provider: Abridge supplies the note-drafting models, and Southern California Permanente Medical Group built KPIN on large language models and custom transformers (Apr 2026).
- The reach
- Maria Ansari, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, said in Jul 2025 that ambient AI had been rolled out to 25,000 Permanente physicians; in Northern California 7,260 physicians used it in 2.58 million encounters from Oct 2023 to Dec 2024.
- The catch
- Kaiser Permanente reports time and clinical results, not cost or revenue returns from AI, and therapists and nurses disputed its use of AI in mental health triage and call centers through 2026.
Snapshot
- Employees
- 225,854
- About Jun 30, 2026; 12.9 million members in 9 states and D.C.
- Technology budget
- Not disclosed
- 2025 capital spending of $4.8B covered facilities and technology, with no split
- AI/ML headcount
- Not disclosed
- Who owns AI
- Daniel Yang, VP of AI
- Oversees quality of all AI applications; CITO Neil Cowles runs the technology organization
- Platform
- Abridge, bought; clinical models built
- Ambient documentation since Aug 2024; Advance Alert Monitor and KPIN built in-house
- Models
- Vendor and in-house
- No general-purpose model provider named; KPIN uses large language models
- Reach
- ~25,000 physicians
- Ambient AI rollout, Jul 2025; no AI tool reported for all employees
- Use cases
- Not counted publicly
- Kaiser Permanente declined to list its AI systems to CalMatters (Jul 2026)
Key findings
Kaiser Permanente made Abridge's ambient documentation tool available in its 40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices in Aug 2024, and Maria Ansari, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, said in Jul 2025 that it had been rolled out to 25,000 physicians.
In Northern California, 7,260 physicians of The Permanente Medical Group used ambient AI scribes in 2,576,627 patient encounters from Oct 2023 to Dec 2024 and saved nearly 16,000 hours of documentation, according to a Kaiser Permanente Division of Research review published in Apr 2025.
Kaiser Permanente has published no cost, revenue or headcount return from AI; its reported results are clinical and operational, such as MRI waits cut by up to 60% in the Northwest region (Jun 2026) and an Advance Alert Monitor that Kaiser Permanente says saves about 500 lives a year (Mar 2026).
AI oversight at Kaiser Permanente sits with Daniel Yang, Vice President of AI and Emerging Technologies, a role created in late 2023 that reports to the Chief Medical Officer, while Neil Cowles, named Chief Information and Technology Officer in Apr 2025, runs technology under EVP Yazdi Bagli.
Kaiser Permanente agreed with the Alliance of Health Care Unions in Aug 2025 to set up a 10-member labor and management task force on technology and AI, while about 2,400 Northern California mental health workers struck for a day in Mar 2026 partly over AI's future role in their work and nurses picketed 22 facilities for AI protections in Sep 2026.
Where Kaiser sits
- Stage
- Experimenting
Kaiser Permanente has reported no business return it credits to AI, for any use case or for the organization as a whole: its 2025 financial results and its 2026 quarterly updates give no AI figure, and the results it publishes are time and clinical measures, such as nearly 16,000 documentation hours saved by Northern California physicians using ambient AI (Apr 2025), MRI waits cut by up to 60% in the Northwest region (Jun 2026) and about 500 lives a year saved by the Advance Alert Monitor (Mar 2026), none tied to a cost, revenue or headcount figure. Kaiser Permanente has not reported a company-wide count of employees using its AI tools either: Abridge's ambient documentation has been open to clinicians in its 40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices since Aug 2024, and Maria Ansari, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, said on an Abridge podcast in Jul 2025 that it had been rolled out to 25,000 physicians, a deployment figure rather than a count of users; the one usage count its Division of Research has published, 7,260 physicians from Oct 2023 to Dec 2024, covers Northern California alone, and no AI tool is reported for its 225,854 employees as a whole. Kaiser Permanente is therefore at Experimenting although AI runs in production in care delivery; one return it credits to AI, or a company-wide count of employees using its AI tools under Vice President of AI Daniel Yang, would move it to Piloting.
How the stages are defined - Ownership
- VP of AI Daniel Yang oversees AI quality under the CMO; CITO Neil Cowles runs technology
- Platform
- Hybrid: Abridge bought for clinical notes; clinical models built in-house
- Models
- Abridge's models plus in-house machine learning and LLM-based tools
- Hosting
- Hosted cloud on Microsoft Azure under a 2021 deal with Accenture; where Abridge and in-house models run is not disclosed
- Reach
- Ambient AI rolled out to about 25,000 physicians (Jul 2025)
How they deploy
Buy the scribe, build the clinical models
Kaiser Permanente bought its most widely used AI tool, Abridge's ambient documentation, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures is also an Abridge investor. Kaiser Permanente's physician groups and its Division of Research build their own models: the Division of Research built the Advance Alert Monitor for deteriorating hospital patients, and Southern California Permanente Medical Group built KPIN, a natural-language booking and triage assistant. Kaiser Permanente also co-designed Care Signals with Abridge, a feature that flags patient conditions during a visit, and was the first to deploy it, according to Becker's Hospital Review.
Start small, test, then expand
Daniel Yang wrote in May 2025 that Kaiser Permanente focuses on a few high-impact AI projects, starts small, learns what works and expands only when ready. Kaiser Permanente ran a 10-week pilot and its own quality assurance testing of ambient documentation in early 2024 before deploying it across eight regions, and Daniel Yang told VentureBeat that the testing drew feedback from thousands of providers.
The research arm as evaluator
Kaiser Permanente uses its Northern California Division of Research to test AI before and after rollout. The Division of Research runs AIM-HI, which funds five studies at health systems across the country that evaluate AI and machine learning for diagnostic decisions, at up to $750,000 each, hosts a clinical trial of the EchoPrime echocardiogram model, and in Sep 2026 won up to $16 million from ARPA-H for a randomized trial of agentic AI in heart failure care.
Labor in the AI rollout
Kaiser Permanente and the Alliance of Health Care Unions agreed in Aug 2025 that AI and technology should complement clinical judgment, that employee input enters the AI lifecycle through a joint task force and unit-based teams, and that Kaiser Permanente will inform unions of new AI used to monitor productivity or performance. MIT Sloan reported in Sep 2026 that more than 3,500 unit-based teams of front-line workers, managers and doctors are to identify where AI can improve workflows.
- Deployment model
- Kaiser Permanente runs AI across both halves of its integrated system. In Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, information technology sits under EVP Yazdi Bagli and Chief Information and Technology Officer Neil Cowles, and Vice President Daniel Yang sets quality oversight for every AI application in clinical operations, research, education and administration. The Permanente Medical Groups have their own technology and data leaders, who took part in the ambient documentation rollout and built tools such as KPIN, and the Northern California Division of Research evaluates models. Abridge is offered to clinicians across Kaiser Permanente's hospitals and medical offices, with patient consent and clinician review of every note.
- Model providers
- Kaiser Permanente has not named a general-purpose model provider such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. Abridge supplies the generative models behind ambient documentation across Kaiser Permanente since Aug 2024; The Permanente Medical Group used a different vendor in its 2023 pilot and changed vendors before the 2024 rollout, according to the Division of Research. Kaiser Permanente's in-house models include the Advance Alert Monitor, a machine learning model trained on data from more than 1.5 million patients, and KPIN, a multilingual natural language system that uses large language models and custom transformers. The MRI tool in the Northwest region is an FDA-cleared product whose vendor Kaiser Permanente has not named, and EchoPrime is an open-source model co-led by Kaiser Permanente researcher David Ouyang and Stanford.
- Data and infrastructure
- Kaiser Permanente signed a multi-year agreement with Accenture and Microsoft in Feb 2021 that uses Microsoft Azure to enhance Kaiser Permanente's hosted cloud environment, with Accenture describing the work as re-platforming digital assets. Kaiser Permanente has not said where Abridge, KPIN or its other models run. The Advance Alert Monitor scans electronic health records every hour and was trained on data from more than 1.5 million patients. Kaiser Permanente told CalMatters in Jun 2026 that ambient recordings are kept no longer than 14 days and are not used to train AI models, while a Division of Research article in Mar 2025 said the audio is not kept.
Platforms and internal tools
Assisted clinical documentation (Abridge)Aug 2024
Kaiser Permanente's assisted clinical documentation tool, powered by Abridge, records a visit with the patient's consent, drafts the clinical note, and leaves the clinician to review and edit it before it enters the medical record. Kaiser Permanente made it available in its 40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices in eight states and D.C. in Aug 2024, and Desiree Gandrup-Dupre, then senior vice president of Care Delivery Technology Services, called it the largest US implementation of ambient listening technology to date.
- Users
- Rolled out to about 25,000 physicians (Jul 2025)
- Models
- Abridge
Advance Alert MonitorAug 2016 to Feb 2019
The Advance Alert Monitor is a machine learning model built by Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research that scans hospital patients' electronic health records every hour and flags those likely to deteriorate within 12 hours. Alerts go to a regional team of specially trained nurses, who decide whether to call the local rapid response team, so physicians do not receive alerts directly. Kaiser Permanente rolled it out to all 21 Northern California hospitals between Aug 2016 and Feb 2019.
- Models
- In-house machine learning
Kaiser Permanente Intelligent Navigator (KPIN)Oct 2024
KPIN is a booking and triage assistant built in-house by Southern California Permanente Medical Group that lets patients describe their needs in their own words, routes them to a visit, a prescription refill or a physician, and connects possible emergencies to a nurse. A Nature study of nearly 3 million encounters reported that KPIN identified high-risk symptoms with 96% accuracy (AMA, Apr 2026).
- Users
- Available to 4.9 million Southern California patients
- Models
- Large language models and custom transformers
Care Signals
Care Signals is a feature in Abridge's platform that Kaiser Permanente co-designed with Abridge over about 15 months and was the first to deploy, according to Becker's Hospital Review; it surfaces a patient's relevant conditions before a visit and prompts the clinician during the visit when a condition has not been addressed. Kaiser Permanente has not published how widely Care Signals is used.
- Models
- Abridge
Vendors and partners
AbridgeAug 2024
Ambient clinical documentation across Kaiser Permanente; co-developer of Care Signals · Kaiser Permanente Ventures is an Abridge investor; Healthcare Innovation (Aug 2024) listed it among investors in Abridge's $30 million Series B, led by Spark Capital.
MicrosoftFeb 2021
Azure cloud platform · Kaiser Permanente signed a multi-year agreement with Accenture and Microsoft that uses Azure to enhance its hosted cloud environment.
AccentureFeb 2021
Cloud and re-platforming partner
ARPA-HSep 2026
Funder of an agentic AI trial in heart failure care · Up to $16 million over three years through the ADVOCATE program, for a randomized trial of about 2,500 patients.
Stanford University
Research partner on the EchoPrime echocardiogram model · EchoPrime was co-led by Kaiser Permanente's David Ouyang and a Stanford researcher and validated at five sites, including Kaiser Permanente Northern California (Nov 2025).
Leadership
AI, data and platform leaders
Executives
AI org map
Responsible AI office under the Chief Medical Officer; IT under an executive vice president; building and evaluation in the physician groups and the research arm
Kaiser Permanente created a vice president of AI and Emerging Technologies role in late 2023 and filled it with Daniel Yang, who reports to Chief Medical Officer Andrew B. Bindman, according to Healthcare IT News. Kaiser Permanente's IT organization moved under EVP Yazdi Bagli when Chief Information Technology Officer Diane Comer retired in early 2024, and Neil Cowles became Chief Information and Technology Officer under Bagli in Apr 2025. Vivian Tan was named chief data and analytics officer in May 2026, according to trade press. The Permanente Medical Groups, which provide care to Kaiser Permanente members, run their own technology and data leadership, and Kaiser Permanente Northern California's Division of Research builds and tests models.
Kaiser Permanente has not disclosed how many people work on AI. Kaiser Permanente's AI work sits in five places: the national IT organization under Yazdi Bagli and Neil Cowles; Daniel Yang's AI and Emerging Technologies office, which reports to the Chief Medical Officer; the data and analytics function that Vivian Tan was named to lead in May 2026; the technology, data and care transformation teams of the Permanente Medical Groups; and research scientists at the Northern California Division of Research. Under the 2025 Alliance agreement, more than 3,500 unit-based teams are also asked to identify where AI can improve their work.
Reporting lines
Chair and CEO
Greg A. Adams
Information Technology and Enterprise Business Services
Yazdi Bagli, EVP
IT for the health plan, care delivery and business functions, including digital, data and analytics and cybersecurity
Information and Technology
Neil Cowles, CITO
Cowles spearheaded the generative AI strategy as CTO from Jun 2024
Chief Medical Officer
Executive vice president; reports to the chair and CEO, per the Nov 2020 appointment release
AI and Emerging Technologies
Daniel Yang, VP
Quality oversight for all AI applications; reporting line per Healthcare IT News
Data and Analytics
Vivian Tan, CDAO
Named May 2026, per CDO Magazine and Becker's; reporting line not published
The Permanente Federation
Brian Hoberman, CIO
National organization of the Permanente Medical Groups, which are separate physician organizations
TPMG data and technology
Vincent Liu, CDO; Gregg Gayre, CTO
Division of Research
Kaiser Permanente Northern California research arm; built the Advance Alert Monitor and runs AIM-HI; the reporting line is inferred
SCPMG Care Transformation
Southern California Permanente Medical Group team that built KPIN
Kaiser Permanente has not published an org chart for AI. Daniel Yang's reporting line to the Chief Medical Officer comes from Healthcare IT News, not a Kaiser Permanente page, and Vivian Tan's place in the org chart is not published. Desiree Gandrup-Dupre, the senior vice president of Care Delivery Technology Services who announced the Abridge rollout in Aug 2024, left to become chief information officer of Memorial Hermann Health System in Apr 2026. Kaiser Permanente has not named who leads member-facing digital products such as kp.org.
Where the AI workforce sits
National IT, data and AI oversight
Neil Cowles's information and technology organization, Vivian Tan's data and analytics function and Daniel Yang's AI and Emerging Technologies office; Kaiser Permanente publishes no headcount for any of them.
Not disclosedPermanente Medical Group technology and data teams
Built KPIN and took part in the ambient documentation rollout with physicians.
Not disclosedDivision of Research
Research scientists who built the Advance Alert Monitor and run AI trials such as EchoPrime and the ARPA-H heart failure study.
Not disclosed
Named people
Use cases
Kaiser Permanente has described a handful of AI tools in production: ambient clinical documentation with Abridge, the Advance Alert Monitor for hospital patients, the KPIN booking and triage assistant in Southern California, a Social Risk Score that flags members with unmet social needs and an MRI noise-reduction tool in the Northwest, plus Care Signals with Abridge and trials of EchoPrime and agentic AI for heart failure. Kaiser Permanente has published no business-level return, such as cost, revenue or headcount, for any of them; its reported results are documentation hours saved, MRI wait times, booking success, members contacted and lives saved, and it declined in Jul 2026 to give a full list of its AI systems.
| Use case | Area | Status | ROI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ambient clinical notes (Abridge) Abridge records visits with patient consent and drafts notes that clinicians review before they enter the record, across Kaiser Permanente's hospitals and medical offices since Aug 2024. In Northern California 7,260 physicians used ambient scribes in 2,576,627 encounters from Oct 2023 to Dec 2024 and saved nearly 16,000 documentation hours. | Clinical documentation | In production | |
| Care Signals Care Signals, co-designed with Abridge and first deployed at Kaiser Permanente, surfaces a patient's relevant conditions before a visit and prompts the clinician when one has not been addressed; how widely Kaiser Permanente uses it is not published. | Clinical documentation | Pilot | |
| Advance Alert Monitor The Advance Alert Monitor flags hospital patients likely to deteriorate within 12 hours for a nurse team in all 21 Northern California hospitals; a 2020 NEJM study found 30-day mortality of 15.8% after an alert against 20.4% in comparison patients, and Kaiser Permanente says it saves about 500 lives a year (Mar 2026). | Hospital care | In production | |
| KPIN booking and triage assistant KPIN lets 4.9 million Southern California patients book care in their own words and routes possible emergencies to a nurse; the AMA reported an adjusted booking success rate of 53.68% and patient satisfaction up nearly nine points (Apr 2026). | Member access | In production | |
| Social Risk Score A Social Risk Score algorithm identifies members most likely to face food insecurity, financial strain or housing problems so they can be connected to support; nearly 1.3 million members were contacted in 2024 (Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy, Mar 2026). | Population health | In production | |
| MRI image noise reduction An FDA-cleared AI tool in the Northwest region reduces MRI image noise so scans take about 30 minutes instead of 45, which Kaiser Permanente said cut MRI waits by up to 60% (Jun 2026). | Radiology | In production | |
| EchoPrime echocardiogram interpretation EchoPrime, an open-source model trained on more than 12 million echocardiogram videos, is in a clinical trial for preliminary echocardiogram assessment at Kaiser Permanente Northern California (Nov 2025). | Cardiology | Pilot | |
| Agentic AI for heart failure treatment An ARPA-H funded study will test agentic AI that suggests heart failure treatments under cardiologist oversight, ending in a randomized trial of about 2,500 patients at up to 21 Northern California medical centers. | Cardiology | Announced | |
| Tone and empathy scoring of advice calls Call center nurses told CalMatters that Kaiser Permanente tested an AI tool that rated the tone and empathy of nurses and patients from summer to Nov 2024, when the tests ended; Kaiser Permanente declined to discuss the tool. | Contact centers | Pilot |
Adoption
Kaiser Permanente's AI reach is concentrated among clinicians. Predictive models came first: the Advance Alert Monitor reached all 21 Northern California hospitals between Aug 2016 and Feb 2019. Generative AI followed with ambient documentation: The Permanente Medical Group began in Oct 2023, Kaiser Permanente ran a 10-week enterprise pilot in early 2024, opened Abridge to clinicians in every region it then served in Aug 2024, and Maria Ansari said it had been rolled out to 25,000 physicians by Jul 2025; in Northern California, 3,447 of the 7,260 physician users had used it in at least 100 encounters by Dec 2024. Members meet AI through KPIN, which has been available to 4.9 million Southern California patients since Oct 2024. Kaiser Permanente has not reported how many clinicians across all its regions use ambient documentation, nor a general-purpose AI assistant for its 225,854 employees or any weekly-use figure.
By the numbers
Rollout, first pilot to today
2013
Kaiser Permanente began testing the Advance Alert Monitor, a machine learning early-warning model for hospital patients built by its Division of Research.
Feb 2019
Kaiser Permanente completed a staggered rollout of the Advance Alert Monitor, begun in Aug 2016, to all 21 Northern California hospitals.
Nov 2020
A New England Journal of Medicine study associated the Advance Alert Monitor with lower mortality: 15.8% within 30 days of an alert against 20.4% in comparison patients.
Feb 2021
Kaiser Permanente signed a multi-year agreement with Accenture and Microsoft that uses Microsoft Azure to enhance its hosted cloud environment.
Late 2023
Kaiser Permanente created the role of vice president of AI and Emerging Technologies and hired Daniel Yang from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Oct 2023
The Permanente Medical Group began using ambient AI scribes in Northern California, changing vendors before the 2024 rollout.
Dec 2023
Kaiser Permanente's AIM-HI program announced grants for five studies of AI for diagnostic decisions at health systems across the country, at up to $750,000 each.
Jan 2024
Chief Information Technology Officer Diane Comer retired and Kaiser Permanente's IT organization moved under EVP Yazdi Bagli.
Early 2024
Kaiser Permanente ran a 10-week pilot and quality assurance testing of ambient clinical documentation before deploying it across eight regions.
Aug 14, 2024
Kaiser Permanente made Abridge's ambient documentation tool available in its 40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices in eight states and D.C.
Oct 2024
Southern California Permanente Medical Group launched KPIN, its in-house AI booking and triage assistant, for its 4.9 million patients.
Mar 25, 2025
Daniel Yang published Kaiser Permanente's seven principles of responsible AI use, covering privacy, reliability, outcomes, transparency, equity, customer-centered design and trust.
Apr 2025
A Division of Research review reported that 7,260 Northern California physicians used ambient AI scribes in 2,576,627 encounters over about a year, and Neil Cowles was named Chief Information and Technology Officer.
Jul 2025
Maria Ansari said ambient AI had been rolled out to 25,000 Permanente physicians.
Aug 22, 2025
Kaiser Permanente and the Alliance of Health Care Unions agreed an AI and technology article creating a joint labor and management task force on technology and AI.
Jun 2026
Kaiser Permanente reported that an FDA-cleared AI tool cut MRI waits by up to 60% in its Northwest region.
Sep 2026
ARPA-H awarded Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research up to $16 million for a randomized trial of agentic AI in heart failure care.
Economics & controls
Spend and ROI
Technology budget
Kaiser Permanente does not publish a technology or AI budget. Kaiser Permanente and Risant Health reported $127.7 billion in operating revenue and $1.4 billion in operating income for 2025, a margin of about 1.1%, and capital spending of $4.8 billion, up from $3.7 billion in 2024, which went to facilities and technology without a split (Feb 2026).
What AI itself costs
Kaiser Permanente has not disclosed what it pays Abridge or any other AI vendor. Kaiser Permanente Ventures is an Abridge investor, and Healthcare Innovation (Aug 2024) listed it among investors in Abridge's $30 million Series B, led by Spark Capital. Kaiser Permanente's research arm funds AIM-HI studies at up to $750,000 each, and ARPA-H awarded it up to $16 million over three years in Sep 2026 for an agentic AI trial.
Reported ROI
Kaiser Permanente has reported no firm-level financial return from AI, and Kaiser Permanente International describes its AI work as aimed at a "return on health", such as clinical outcomes and patient experience (Sep 2024). The results Kaiser Permanente publishes are time and clinical measures: nearly 16,000 documentation hours saved by Northern California physicians in about a year of ambient AI use, the equivalent of 1,794 working days (Apr 2025); MRI scans cut from about 45 to about 30 minutes and waits down by up to 60% in the Northwest region (Jun 2026); and about 500 lives a year saved by the Advance Alert Monitor (Mar 2026). None of these is tied to a cost, revenue or headcount figure.
Headcount
Kaiser Permanente counted 225,854 employees around Jun 30, 2026, while its Apr 2025 release on Neil Cowles cited more than 240,000; Kaiser Permanente has not explained the difference or tied any staffing change to AI. Kaiser Permanente told NPR in Mar 2026 that it does not use AI to make medical or other care decisions, and its 2025 AI article with the Alliance of Health Care Unions points to existing employment and income security agreements for AI's effects on jobs.
Governance and risk
Responsible AI oversight
Daniel Yang, Kaiser Permanente's Vice President of AI and Emerging Technologies, sets quality oversight for all AI applications in clinical operations, research, education and administration. Kaiser Permanente's seven principles, published in Mar 2025, say tools that do not advance high-quality, affordable care are not used and that AI does not make medical decisions at Kaiser Permanente, and a Kaiser Permanente policy brief in Mar 2026 said every AI tool it deploys goes through a vetting process for safety, effectiveness and equity.
Testing before scale
Kaiser Permanente ran its own quality assurance on ambient documentation in early 2024 and published the method in NEJM AI in Mar 2025. Daniel Yang told VentureBeat in Jul 2024 that the testing drew feedback from thousands of providers and surfaced hallucinations and other issues. Daniel Yang argues that the Advance Alert Monitor works because of workflow design: nurses screen every alert before physicians are called.
Patient consent and recordings
Kaiser Permanente requires patient consent before ambient documentation records a visit, and clinicians review every AI-drafted note. Kaiser Permanente told CalMatters in Jun 2026 that recordings are kept no longer than 14 days and are not used to train AI models, while mental health clinicians said the consent process does not explain storage or access.
AI in the union contract
Kaiser Permanente's Aug 2025 AI and technology article with the Alliance of Health Care Unions sets up a 10-member task force, five from labor and five from management, within 120 days of ratification, to share planned AI rollouts, guide training and communications, and discuss topics such as hiring and performance evaluation. Kaiser Permanente must inform the union of new AI used to monitor productivity or performance. MIT Sloan described the task force as having direct decision-making authority over technology investments, while the agreed text frames it as a working body that does not replace local bargaining.
Disputes over AI in mental health care
About 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health workers in Northern California held a one-day strike in Mar 2026, partly over AI's future role in their work. Kaiser Permanente proposed an AI committee of leaders, mental health clinicians and union representatives to advise on AI in mental health services, and moved to mediation in Jun 2026 after the National Union of Healthcare Workers rejected it. The union filed a complaint with California's Department of Managed Health Care and the U.S. Department of Labor on Jul 20, 2026, and San Francisco's Board of Supervisors voted on Sep 1, 2026 to urge Kaiser Permanente to drop contract proposals that include referring more patients to AI-based therapy platforms. Kaiser Permanente said AI does not replace human assessment or make care decisions.
Nurses and call centers
Kaiser Permanente call center nurses described AI tools that rated their tone and empathy in Jul 2026, and Kaiser Permanente said contact center tools support quality assurance with human review but declined to list its AI systems. The California Nurses Association, which represents more than 25,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses, picketed 22 facilities on Sep 1, 2026 to seek a say in how AI is tested and introduced; Kaiser Permanente said its technology supports nurses rather than replacing their clinical judgment.
Policy positions
Kaiser Permanente asks policymakers for consistent standards for responsible AI, technical and financial support so health care organizations, including small and rural hospitals, can use and monitor AI tools, and large-scale clinical trials of AI (Nov 2025). Daniel Yang represents Kaiser Permanente on the Coalition for Health AI provider advisory board and the Bipartisan Policy Center's AI health advisory group.
Recent signals
Sep 28, 2026
MIT Sloan reported that Kaiser Permanente's AI deal with the Alliance of Health Care Unions sets up a five-and-five labor and management AI task force and asks more than 3,500 unit-based teams to find where AI can improve workflows.
Sep 9, 2026
ARPA-H awarded Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research up to $16 million over three years to test agentic AI for heart failure treatment, ending in a randomized trial of about 2,500 patients.
Sep 1, 2026
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors unanimously urged Kaiser Permanente to drop contract proposals that include referring more mental health patients to AI-based therapy platforms; Kaiser Permanente said it does not use AI to make clinical decisions.
Sep 1, 2026
Kaiser Permanente nurses in the California Nurses Association picketed 22 facilities, seeking a say in how AI is tested and introduced as contract talks began.
Jul 21, 2026
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors called a hearing on Kaiser Permanente's use of digital triage and AI in mental health care, a day after the National Union of Healthcare Workers filed a 29-page complaint with state and federal regulators.
Jul 13, 2026
California nurses protested Kaiser Permanente's AI strategy outside the AHA Leadership Summit in Denver, where Greg Adams said Kaiser Permanente is committed to involving nurses in its AI work.
Jul 9, 2026
CalMatters and The Markup reported that Kaiser Permanente call center nurses say AI and monitoring tools put speed ahead of care, including a tone and empathy tool tested in 2024; Kaiser Permanente declined to list its AI systems.
Jun 24, 2026
Kaiser Permanente reported that an FDA-cleared AI tool cut MRI scans from about 45 to about 30 minutes and patient waits by up to 60% in its Northwest region.
Jun 16, 2026
Kaiser Permanente mental health clinicians raised consent and storage concerns about Abridge recordings; Kaiser Permanente said recordings are kept no longer than 14 days and are not used to train AI models.
Jun 11, 2026
Kaiser Permanente moved its talks with the National Union of Healthcare Workers to mediation after the union rejected its proposal for an AI committee on mental health services.
May 2026
Kaiser Permanente named Vivian Tan chief data and analytics officer, responsible for turning its data assets into AI and automation capabilities, according to CDO Magazine.
Apr 29, 2026
Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research held a showcase of the five AIM-HI studies of AI for diagnostic decisions, including one on cardiac amyloidosis presented by David Ouyang.
Apr 23, 2026
The AMA reported that Southern California Permanente Medical Group built KPIN in-house on large language models and custom transformers and that it reached an adjusted booking success rate of 53.68%.
Mar 19, 2026
About 2,400 Kaiser Permanente mental health workers in Northern California ended a 24-hour strike held partly over AI's future role in their work; Kaiser Permanente told NPR it does not use AI to make care decisions.
Nov 11, 2025
Kaiser Permanente researcher David Ouyang co-led EchoPrime, an open-source echocardiogram model validated at five sites, with a clinical trial under way at Kaiser Permanente Northern California.
Quick answers
- How does Kaiser Permanente deploy AI?
- Kaiser Permanente deploys AI mainly inside care delivery: it bought Abridge's ambient documentation tool and made it available in its 40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices in Aug 2024, and its physicians and researchers build their own clinical models, such as the Advance Alert Monitor and the KPIN booking assistant. Vice President Daniel Yang oversees the quality of every AI tool, and Kaiser Permanente publishes clinical results but no financial return from AI.
- What does Kaiser Permanente use AI for?
- Kaiser Permanente has described a handful of AI tools in production: ambient clinical documentation with Abridge, the Advance Alert Monitor for hospital patients, the KPIN booking and triage assistant in Southern California, a Social Risk Score that flags members with unmet social needs and an MRI noise-reduction tool in the Northwest, plus Care Signals with Abridge and trials of EchoPrime and agentic AI for heart failure. Kaiser Permanente has published no business-level return, such as cost, revenue or headcount, for any of them; its reported results are documentation hours saved, MRI wait times, booking success, members contacted and lives saved, and it declined in Jul 2026 to give a full list of its AI systems.
- Who leads AI at Kaiser Permanente?
- AI at Kaiser Permanente is led by Neil Cowles (Senior Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Officer); Daniel Yang (Vice President, Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies); Vivian Tan (Chief Data and Analytics Officer). Ownership of AI on the org chart: VP of AI Daniel Yang oversees AI quality under the CMO; CITO Neil Cowles runs technology.
- What AI platform does Kaiser Permanente use?
- Kaiser Permanente bought Abridge's ambient documentation tool for its clinicians in Aug 2024 and builds its own clinical models, such as the Advance Alert Monitor for hospital patients and the KPIN booking assistant for members.
- Which AI models does Kaiser Permanente use?
- Kaiser Permanente names no general-purpose model provider: Abridge supplies the note-drafting models, and Southern California Permanente Medical Group built KPIN on large language models and custom transformers (Apr 2026).
- How many Kaiser employees use AI?
- Maria Ansari, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, said in Jul 2025 that ambient AI had been rolled out to 25,000 Permanente physicians; in Northern California 7,260 physicians used it in 2.58 million encounters from Oct 2023 to Dec 2024.
- How far has AI spread at Kaiser Permanente?
- Kaiser Permanente has reported no business return it credits to AI, for any use case or for the organization as a whole: its 2025 financial results and its 2026 quarterly updates give no AI figure, and the results it publishes are time and clinical measures, such as nearly 16,000 documentation hours saved by Northern California physicians using ambient AI (Apr 2025), MRI waits cut by up to 60% in the Northwest region (Jun 2026) and about 500 lives a year saved by the Advance Alert Monitor (Mar 2026), none tied to a cost, revenue or headcount figure. Kaiser Permanente has not reported a company-wide count of employees using its AI tools either: Abridge's ambient documentation has been open to clinicians in its 40 hospitals and more than 600 medical offices since Aug 2024, and Maria Ansari, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, said on an Abridge podcast in Jul 2025 that it had been rolled out to 25,000 physicians, a deployment figure rather than a count of users; the one usage count its Division of Research has published, 7,260 physicians from Oct 2023 to Dec 2024, covers Northern California alone, and no AI tool is reported for its 225,854 employees as a whole. Kaiser Permanente is therefore at Experimenting although AI runs in production in care delivery; one return it credits to AI, or a company-wide count of employees using its AI tools under Vice President of AI Daniel Yang, would move it to Piloting.
Open questions
- What cost, capacity or retention return does Kaiser Permanente attribute to ambient documentation, and what does the Abridge contract cost?
- How many Kaiser Permanente clinicians across all regions use ambient documentation, as against the 25,000 physicians it had been rolled out to by Jul 2025?
- How many AI tools does Kaiser Permanente run in production, given that it declined to give CalMatters a full list in Jul 2026?
- Does Kaiser Permanente offer a general-purpose generative AI assistant to its 225,854 employees, and which model providers would sit behind it?
- Where do Abridge, KPIN and Kaiser Permanente's other models run: Microsoft Azure, a vendor cloud or Kaiser Permanente's own data centers?
- How many extra MRI scans and how much cost per scan did the Northwest noise-reduction tool deliver?
- Has the Advance Alert Monitor spread beyond Northern California, and what did the Social Risk Score outreach change in members' costs or use of care?
- Has the Alliance-KP task force on technology and AI been formed, who sits on it, and what has it decided?
- Does Kaiser Permanente's mental health E-Visit triage use AI, as the National Union of Healthcare Workers says, and how will that dispute be settled?
- Does Daniel Yang still report to the Chief Medical Officer, how does Vivian Tan's data and analytics office divide AI work with his, and who owns member-facing digital and AI products such as kp.org?
- Are ambient recordings deleted at once, as the Division of Research said in Mar 2025, or kept up to 14 days, as Kaiser Permanente told CalMatters in Jun 2026?
- How widely is Care Signals used, and has it changed care-gap closure or risk-adjustment coding?
Sources
Kaiser Permanente
- Fast facts (members, employees, physicians, Jun 2026)
- Kaiser Permanente and Risant Health report 2025 financial results (Feb 6, 2026)
- Kaiser Permanente and Risant Health Q1 2026 financial update (May 8, 2026)
- Kaiser Permanente and Risant Health Q2 2026 financial update (Aug 14, 2026)
- 2025 annual report
- Kaiser Permanente improves member experience with AI-enabled clinical technology (Aug 14, 2024)
- AI in health care: 7 principles of responsible use (Mar 25, 2025)
- Daniel Yang on trust and Kaiser Permanente's approach to AI (May 21, 2025)
- Will AI rules leave small hospitals behind? (Nov 19, 2025)
- AI cut MRI wait times up to 60% (Jun 24, 2026)
- Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy: How Kaiser Permanente uses AI (Mar 2026)
- Kaiser Permanente International: AI in health care program (Sep 2024)
- Kaiser Permanente and NUHW move to mediation (Jun 11, 2026)
- Neil Cowles named chief information and technology officer (Apr 24, 2025)
- Andrew Bindman, MD, named EVP and chief medical officer (Nov 5, 2020)
- Neil Cowles, biography
- Daniel Yang, MD, biography
- Yazdi Bagli, biography
- Greg A. Adams, biography
- Andrew B. Bindman, MD, biography
Division of Research and Permanente Medicine
- AI-assisted notetaking gains steady support from physicians (Apr 1, 2025)
- Quality assurance informs large-scale use of ambient AI clinical documentation (Mar 27, 2025)
- Researchers build largest-ever AI model to interpret echocardiograms (Nov 11, 2025)
- Award to evaluate AI for heart failure care (Sep 9, 2026)
- About AIM-HI
- AIM-HI virtual showcase (May 13, 2026)
- Analysis: AI scribes save physicians time (Apr 7, 2025)
- AI-powered patient portal enhances access, safety and satisfaction (Aug 11, 2025)
Labor agreements
Partners
News
- AMA: Intuitive AI portal drives patients where they need to go (Apr 23, 2026)
- Becker's Hospital Review: Abridge and Kaiser Permanente debut Care Signals
- Becker's Hospital Review: Kaiser Permanente names data, analytics chief (May 2026)
- CDO Magazine: Vivian Tan named Kaiser Permanente chief data and analytics officer (May 15, 2026)
- Healthcare Innovation: Kaiser rolling out Abridge's documentation tool (Aug 14, 2024)
- Healthcare Innovation: Kaiser Permanente announces planned changes to IT leadership (Aug 22, 2023)
- Healthcare Innovation: Kaiser predictive analytics tool reduces hospital mortality (Dec 1, 2020)
- Healthcare IT News: Kaiser Permanente's new head of AI
- National CIO Review: Neil Cowles named Kaiser Permanente CIO (Apr 29, 2025)
- VentureBeat: How Kaiser Permanente is using gen AI (Jul 15, 2024)
- KALW: SF supervisors push back on Kaiser's use of AI in mental health care (Sep 2, 2026)
- Local News Matters: Kaiser nurses picket over AI and staffing (Sep 1, 2026)
- MedCity News: Kaiser nurses protest AI strategy at AHA Leadership Summit (Jul 14, 2026)
- CalMatters: Kaiser nurses say surveillance of them is undermining healthcare (Jul 9, 2026)
- The Markup: Kaiser Permanente nurses say technology is making their jobs worse (Jul 9, 2026)
- CalMatters: Kaiser mental health staff raise concerns about AI recording tool (Jun 16, 2026)
- NPR: A strike by therapists spotlights concern about AI replacing providers (Mar 19, 2026)
- Behavioral Health Business: Kaiser faces clinician backlash over AI in behavioral health (Jul 21, 2026)
Data confidence
- Confirmed
- Stated in a primary or reputable public source.
- Estimated
- Derived or approximated from public reporting.
- Unconfirmed
- Reported, but not yet corroborated.
Kaiser Permanente profile · Enterprise AI diffusion report by Imagine · facts checked against their sources on Nov 1, 2026
