Continued progress ensuring access to mental health care

Across California and the nation, demand for mental health care continues to exceed the available resources. Despite these ongoing challenges, Kaiser Permanente has made significant progress improving member access to care. Since 2020, we’ve invested more than $2 billion to expand mental health facilities, hire and train clinicians, and grow our provider network so members can get care faster. Today, we offer more choice and access than ever before and meet or exceed all state requirements for timely access to mental health care.

We have greatly expanded our behavioral health network and implemented new tools to track supply and demand across California. Since 2024, we have grown our network of internal and external licensed mental health professionals to nearly 35,000 across the state to ensure our patients have timely access to care. Thanks to the flexibility this expanded network provides, our patients can get nonurgent appointments to meet their clinical needs within regulatory access standards. Those with urgent care needs can generally get appointments within 48 hours, and for anyone in crisis we have staff available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We’re enabling a strong pipeline of mental health clinicians, investing in programs like the Kaiser Permanente Mental Health Scholars Academy, which partners with 8 California academic institutions that offer mental health degree programs to support Kaiser Permanente’s working professionals. We have additional investments to support our own pipeline and have community investments to help expand statewide capacity in mental health degree and clinical training programs, emphasizing graduating students who reflect community needs.

Our progress is also reflected in our most recent quarterly update to the California Department of Managed Health Care about how we are implementing the corrective action work plan related to the 2023 settlement agreement with the department.

To make getting the right care easier, we have streamlined how members find and schedule behavioral health services, so they can book directly with mental health clinicians. To ensure member concerns are addressed promptly and appropriately, we strengthened our grievance and appeals processes. And to help ensure we can see any problems early and act quickly, we have enhanced our quality assurance program through improved data access, analytics, and auditing.

This work is informed by what members have told us — through surveys we conducted of 6,000 current and former members, interviews, and analysis of millions of visits and claims. We continue to meet regularly with the California Department of Managed Health Care and appreciate its support and oversight as we implement the corrective action work plan. This work reflects Kaiser Permanente’s full accountability for improving behavioral health care and our continued commitment to delivering evidence-based, high-quality mental health services as an essential part of total health.