Diane Gage Lofgren joined Kaiser Permanente's communications team in 2006, a year that saw the healthcare provider in the news quite a bit. Its kidney transplant center in San Francisco was under fire for mismanagement. The company was also under scrutiny for possible patient dumping in LA. The attention was nearly always handled in a reactive way. But Lofgren, no stranger to healthcare PR, sought to add a big-picture perspective.

"It was an aggressive start. It's been that way ...