As humble as he is sharp as a tack, Kaiser’s affable VP of health plan service and administration isn’t the type to call attention to his role as a key player in one of the most innovative healthcare systems in the country. A career in healthcare administration wasn’t even his plan from the outset.

The turn of the millennium brought unprecedented demand for IT expertise within the healthcare industry, so after landing at First Hawaiian Bank for a time after college, Garret Sugai joined the stream of IT professionals who made the leap into healthcare and never looked back.

He’s worn a lot of hats during his 17 years with the organization. Since joining Kaiser Permanente Hawaii in 2001, Sugai has held both technical and leadership positions at KP, including lead programmer and analyst in the health plan’s IT department and director of business development and analysis.

Now in his third year leading the health plan services and administration division, Sugai has a proven track record of navigating the industry’s challenging landscape with agility, resilience and effective collaboration.

Besides guiding the organization through implementation of the electronic medical record, Sugai was active in another major reorganization within the industry: onset of the Affordable Care Act and subsequent establishment of the state’s health exchange. In his capacity at the time as director of membership administration, exchange operations and healthcare reform for Kaiser Permanente’s Hawai‘i region, Sugai was instrumental in the organization’s participation in the Hawai‘i Health Connector—the state exchange created in accordance with the ACA—as well as its transition to the federal system after the state exchange shut down in 2015.

According to Sugai, Kaiser Permanente Hawaii had a distinct edge throughout this process. “Because we’re integrated, we were able to work really closely with our physician partners and nursing staff and prepare them for what was coming,” he says.

Now, like all healthcare institutions making changes to improve quality of care for their patients, a big area of focus for Kaiser Permanente is catching more health issues upstream. “Part of that is making sure we’re reaching our members through all possible avenues,” Sugai says, another area in which Kaiser has a unique advantage.

“Kaiser Permanente is a big organization with a lot to leverage,” he says. “Because we’re in several states, we’re able to see how they’re advancing tech in other places and learn some of their best practices.”

What they do know is that roughly 50 percent of KP members are eschewing traditional face-to-face interactions with their physician and instead opting for some form of digital visit. Therein lies one of Kaiser’s most compelling value propositions—freedom of choice.

Kaiser Permanente isn’t the only healthcare system challenging the traditional care delivery model, but it’s an area in which they’re leading the charge. “Some are all about the relationship and the face-to face interaction with their physician, and some would prefer to use an app,” Sugai says. “With our KP app, if you don’t want to talk to somebody or go in to the doctor’s office, you might not have to.”

It all comes down to how you define choice. For Kaiser, it’s empowering people to take charge of how and when they receive the services they need, as well as providing high-quality care that safeguards their ability to choose. “You don’t want patients to find out about a condition so late in their lives that they no longer have a choice,” Sugai says.

That level of care isn’t a job for one provider—at least, that’s the idea behind Kaiser’s longstanding model of integrated managed care. It takes an entire care team looking out for not only your physical health but also your mental and social well-being. “In our integrated model, health insurance and all our ancillaries are under one roof,” Sugai says. In other words, collaboration is in the organization’s DNA.

“I think the focus right now is on our patients and making sure we’re delivering high-quality healthcare services,” Sugai says. “We believe that lowering healthcare costs is about delivering better care and giving people choices, and that reduced costs will come as a by-product of all of these things. That’s what we stay focused on—preventive care, early detection and ensuring that our care team is there in support of our members’ total health.”