 When you hear the word research, what do you think of? Research means testing things with the hope of making discoveries. People can do research on a lot of different topics. In particular, health research focuses on trying to understand many things including what keeps people healthy, what makes people sick, what treatments work, and what treatments don't work for certain people, what prevents disease, and much more. Health research is important because it helps health care providers learn what makes people sick, and this may help with discovering new treatments and cures. An important point about research, sometimes discoveries are made and sometimes they're not. Many of these discoveries take many years, even decades, but research always provides new information. New information is very valuable. It helps future researchers make more discoveries. Kaiser Permanente has a long history of doing valuable health research. We study cancer, heart disease, HIV-AIDS, diabetes, among many others. Each year, Kaiser Permanente researchers add information to our society's knowledge about these diseases and conditions as well as many others. One of the exciting new ways that Kaiser Permanente is developing health knowledge is through the Kaiser Permanente Research Bank. The KP Research Bank is a research resource that collects health information and a small blood sample from volunteers. You can change the future of health. Learn more at kp.org slash Research Bank.