 Well, good afternoon everyone. I'm Tony Beretta, Senior Vice President for Government Relations for Kaiser Permanente, and I want to thank everyone here in the room for spending the day with us talking about a very fascinating and important subject, what work we can all do together on suicide prevention. I thought the morning was actually very constructive and exciting to think about the afternoon and all that we're going to be considering this afternoon as well. I also want to welcome for the folks in the room here, you won't know this, but this afternoon for this session we are live streaming this session across our Kaiser Permanente workplace platform forum. So this will be going out to the Kaiser Permanente community across the country who's tuning in on their phones, computers, iPads, or whatever other device they have to access that platform, which is a very useful way to bring us together. But I have the great pleasure this afternoon to introduce my boss, Bernard Tyson, the Chairman and CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan. Bernard assumed the role of CEO in 2013 and has been chair since January of 2014. He has a career at Kaiser Permanente that's spanned more than 30 years. During that time he successfully managed almost everything across our organization, serving in roles from hospital administrator to division president to president and chief operations officer. He has a master's degree in business and health service administration and a bachelor's degree in health service management from Golden Gate University in San Francisco and he earned a leadership certificate from Harvard University. I will say that in the years since Bernard has taken the helm at Kaiser Permanente it has been very gratifying to be the leader of the public policy function at Kaiser Permanente in this space. Bernard has taken the issue of mental health and wellness and brought it to the center of our public policy activities and he's brought it to the center of concern as an operational matter as well. I can tell you in our senior leadership conversations we are frequently talking about these issues of mental health and wellness, the need to develop a stronger platform to provide the services that are needed to address problems of the pipeline and all manners of issues that we believe at Kaiser Permanente we have a unique opportunity to try to help lead the way with many others to improve the mental health system in the United States. So with that Bernard I simply want to thank you for being here with us and invite you to come on up and let us know what's on your mind. Thank you. Thanks Tony. Good afternoon everybody. Yeah, exactly. What do y'all have for lunch? Thrive food huh? Good afternoon. Yeah, we're Tony said we're live so I want to make sure that the audience on the live streaming know that we are really here. It's really really great to be here this afternoon and to share a couple of top of mind comments with you. The leadership team and I have been traveling around the country. Which we tend to do at this time looking at the strategic plans from the regions as part of our annual exercise to sort of assess where we are today. What set of assumptions that we make last year and how many of those assumptions have panned out to be true and if not why not and how does this inform us as we go forward looking out over the next you know one year, three years, 10 years. It's been really energizing and engaging. The whole landscape is changing around us. So we're not the only ones going through change. The environment in which we exist is really changing during each of those rounds. This time we actually spent focused time on mental health and wellness in each of our regions. The latest thinking with the strategies around it. What else can and should we be doing? What are the challenges and issues? And as one region said, the good news is the belief that Kaiser Permanente and others but Kaiser Permanente really being on the forefront of working and putting resources against the issue of stigma is paying off. That we believe it is generating more people coming forward to say I can't find my words but I know I need to talk to someone or I have found my words and know my words and now I'm telling you I need help and assistance and guidance to build resilience and all the other things that we talk about. And then it's just a stressful environment that people find themselves and we all do existing in and so people are in fact around the country. In fact, even beyond the country around the world speaking out around the challenges that we see collectively and mental health and wellness and whether or not the health care system is equipped in the 21st century to address the issues of the 21st century that we find ourselves grappling with on a daily basis. And I don't need to remind this audience but you probably know it better than I. I mean it's everything from being wired 24 7 with wireless technology that allows us to stay in touch with news as it happens 24 7. You know, many of us we sit in meetings like this and none of us anymore turn these things off. And so it flashes and vibrates and a couple of the executive cases who for some reason don't know how to put their phones on vibrate. It rings and some of our meetings and it's just news all day long and not just news about what's going on in this country is just news around the world. And as we all know, the whole purpose of news is to share bad news. And so most of it is bad news and or news that continues to generate, you know, tension and friction and all those things. And so you have those kinds of challenges that we find ourselves dealing with every single day. We have the stresses of nobody has enough time anymore because everything is moving so quickly. Now you see it. Now it's gone. We live with text messaging. And I actually a big fan of text messaging because you know, short to the point and you get a lot of things said and done. The problem, though, with text messaging is when you misinterpret the intention of the short words, right? And then that leads to something else. I mean, Pat Courdiagne me tell me something innocently by text and all of a sudden I said, Wow, he must be having a bad day and must be forgetting who he's talking to. Also, let me call him up and send him straight. And then then we have to meet for coffee and read night ourselves calm down and all that. So stressful times that we all find ourselves in what hasn't changed significantly in the midst of all the changes that have happened significantly. What hasn't changed is a fundamental delivery system of how to deal with and support and bring resources to mental health and mental health and well being. And so we've spent time, Kaiser Permanente, you know, why range of us talking to the industry and to the country and to anyone else who would live and listen that we now live in the 21st century. And we need to rethink, as we said in the early generation of this, we need to rethink the whole idea of the metaphor of how we detach the head from the rest of the body and thinking about mental health and wellness and the fact that we've built systems and records and everything where when you say in the industry, I have a mental problem, you get designated to a whole different place and and you get recorded in a whole different way and the beat goes on. And we feel like the time has come for us to rethink the whole makeup of mental health and wellness. The fact that the matter is the brain is like any other organ in the body. And so how do we in the 21st century begin to think through how do we drive that kind of strategy? We have reorganized in some ways our whole delivery around this thinking. We have a fantastic national leader for mental health services and Dr. Mardukai is amazing. We have a whole leadership team at the national level. And then we have the connections across the entire region. It's an all in all hands on debt strategy and approach, which gives us I think the best opportunity for how do we in fact build an organization that can respond to the ever growing demands and needs of millions of people around the country. And and now we've added into this this complicated topic to many of us called suicide. It is and has been one of the areas where we've gone in it really the better understand and to see what else we can do as an organization to really put our collective arms around prevention and making sure that we do other things because every life is precious. And we have learned a lot. We have fully engaged others in this area. We have on our board of directors, one of the past Surgeon Generals, Dr. Regina Benjamin. And when she was the Surgeon General under the Obama administration, she actually her organization actually even put together a white paper on suicide and suicide prevention. And so you can go online and actually see work that was done in the federal government thanks to her leadership and also her passion on this on this topic. At a personal level, I've been personally impacted by many stories and many versions of understanding this as a part of both health and wellness, but also as part of our model, which is prevention, which is how do we now figure out the code to prevent this from happening? And what does that mean for a fully integrated system like Kaiser Permanente that is privileged to take care of almost 13 million people just under 13 million people? Hopefully everyone in this room is a member of not I need to sign you up because we're working on getting to the 13 million people in the midst of all this work. One of the individuals who deeply impacted me is in the room and that's Bertha. And I didn't know who Bertha was. And ironically, today is the first day that we actually met face to face. But Bertha sent me a letter and sent Don a letter that just impacted my life and whole thought process. This period. It was one of those moments where you get something, you hear something, you see something or you read something and it both validates and also does something to you. And that's my story of the Bertha story that I have shared in so many audiences with so many people about what I call the Bertha story. And so it's a privilege to know that Bertha works here at Kaiser Permanente and how much she is dedicated to preventing death by suicide. And so hats off to Bertha and the great work that she's doing as part of her calling. So Bertha is my yeah. We have the other part about Bertha. We have we have a strategic framework that we're working on as many of not all of you know in Kaiser Permanente shared agenda. And the part of the shared agenda is how do we tell our stories? And it is also a belief that we are fortunate at Kaiser Permanente to have so many wonderful people everywhere who have gone through and walked through life experiences that are incredibly valuable to an organization who is seeking the best ways to care for 13 almost 13 million people. And as I have often said as one of the late superstars of the music world wrote a song who happens to be my cousin. He wrote a song called Everybody is a Star. It's a gentleman named Sly Stone. And I like to walk around thinking about that with people that everybody is a star. Just a matter of who's going to put the the camera or the flashlight or spotlight on you. And then you demonstrate that you're a star. So Bertha is my example of everybody is a star that just sent the letter and then all the lights came on as just a great example of the wonderful people that we have at Kaiser Permanente and just wonderful people on earth. So that's my story about Bertha. The second one is I guess about two weeks ago now about two we have several families who each shared a very unfortunate situation and that is they had a son or a daughter who is no longer with them because of death by suicide. And the parents felt strongly that they wanted time with me period. And they wanted to do a couple of things. They wanted for me and then the extension of me the team. They wanted us to hear about their loved one. They wanted to tell that story. They wanted us to appreciate who the person was and each of the families. The second part of it was they wanted us to have a glimpse into what the experience was like going through it and then surviving after it. And then the third part was they wanted to offer suggestions to Kaiser Permanente of what was working and what we are to continue to think through as part of our commitment to our ongoing work around suicide prevention and just mental health treatment as an organization that millions of families are relying on. And so the team and I invited them in and they spent a couple of hours with me and the team. And that's my if you will second moment. And I'm number one as I think all of you can imagine. I've never been so deeply impacted by a meeting at that level. Then what happened on that particular day. Every single family. Number one, the love for their child front and center felt at every level you can imagine. Number two, the stories of, you know, going from a baby to an adult to what happened is really something to go through. First for the family, but also being able to tell that story to keep the memories alive was for me just an honor to hear each one of those and what that person who I did not have the privilege of meeting in person meant to this world. And then the third one was the passion around wanting us to be even better and to succeed. And as one mother said in particular, wanting us to commit to doing everything in our power, every single thing in our power to prevent any other family having to suffer the way each of them suffered and suffers every single day as they described it. And I made that commitment and we made that commitment. And I have every intention to live up to that commitment to the absolute extent possible because every life matters. And they wanted to hear are we committed to the next level? And we were clear that we are committed. We also agree that we're gonna meet with them again and report back to them how we see our plan going forward and any modifications to it and hopefully to continue to engage them for guidance as we go forward. And they have talked about that that will allow us to continue to work together as a result of this meeting as a result of the situations that happen in each of their families. And so it's a privilege to be able to stop here and to spend a moment with all of you on this topic. And it's a privilege to work for an organization like Kaiser Permanente who is absolutely committed to one being the best at getting better as Dr. Ed Ellison likes to say all the time and from Southern California, but also having a true commitment to being responsible for what we do as an organization. And part of that is to continue to learn and to grow as we continue to innovate and work together to meet the ever growing demands of the people that we're privileged to take care of as well as the people in the communities in which we exist in which we also have a line of sight towards as well. And so I look forward to all of us continuing to figure it out. I look forward to us once again being on the cutting edge of the latest thinking, the latest practices, the latest work that needs to go into this topic and what it means in the 21st century. And it's just an honor to just spend a few minutes with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Really terrific. And Bernard, I'll just, I just want to reflect on it's fantastic for you to get to spend a little bit of time with us as we have these sessions. We've over the past several years held these Institute for Health Policy Forum sessions in order to take a step back from the day to day issues, both of operations and the day to day issues of public policy in order to do just meeting with people we wouldn't normally meet with. So it's, I think we're going to try to keep up these sessions as we go forward. We've done them on drug pricing. We've done several in the mental health space. We're doing things on telehealth. Ceci's whispering to me we're doing telehealth. So there's, it's really terrific. And actually Bernard has joined us for substantial parts of all of these sessions, which I think demonstrates how critical we look at this as an organization, the set of issues that we're working on. So again, Bernard, thank you so much for, for joining us. Appreciate it.