Michelle Linares is a senior manager at National Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity for Kaiser Permanente, and a healthcare professional for over 15 years. She currently delivers enterprise level consultation on health equity and workplace inclusion and leads the Business Resource Group (BRG) strategy and governance. In her combined experience at Kaiser Permanente, Michelle has designed, consulted, and implemented various strategic initiatives in health education, quality improvement, culturally responsive care, and workplace engagement.

Michelle is most proud of re-engineering patient resources to increase digital and health literacy to 4.1 million patients across Kaiser Permanente Northern California’s market centering the Hispanic and Latino community. She steered administrators, physicians, clinical staff, patients, and community partners to design and implement over three hundred health education resources and modules rooted in equity-centered design. Michelle also implemented the very first bilingual-Spanish text message campaign for The Permanente Medical Group (TPMG) focusing on diabetes, mental health, and healthy living engaging over 10,000 patients and members of the community within the first year of its launch. Lastly, she co-created and facilitated a module titled Integrating Salud En Español resources into your practice to support physicians and clinical staff share culturally responsive care resources with their monolingual and bilingual-Spanish patients. Training over 1,000 physicians within two years. In 2020, she became an integral strategic partner across the enterprise to inform culturally responsive interventions to support Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This resulted in informing Kaiser Permanente’s COVID-19 Social Health Playbook and an internal Equitable Care Toolkit.

Michelle’s love for public health, people, and systems guides her values of empathy, curiosity, and collaboration to foster inclusive experiences and outcomes. Within the first year of joining Kaiser Permanente, Michelle participated in multiple BRGs as a member which expanded her workplace community, and career development. She co-led the Latinx BRG, Kaiser Permanente’s first BRG to be recognized as Latina Style’s Top 15 ERG for three consecutive years during her leadership. One of her biggest accomplishments includes co-leading the very first Latinx Mental Health Summit with an aimed to elevate culturally responsive care effective practices to advance health equity for BIPOC communities accessing mental health services. She reached 1,000 participants providing access to Kaiser Permanente’s top leaders in equity, inclusion, and diversity, marketing, and mental health. Michelle has experienced the immense value and impact of the BRGs and now ensures they serve as cultural advisors to leaders and partners to transform workplace inclusion and culturally responsive care.

Michelle received her undergraduate degree in public health with a minor in Spanish from San José State University followed by a master’s in business administration. In 2019, Michelle received Silicon Valley Latino’s Creo En Ti Champion for her impact at Kaiser Permanente. As a first-generation Salvadorian American, college graduate, and healthcare professional, Michelle has been committed to Latino Community Foundation’s philanthropy movement as a founder, member, and advisor to Latinos in Healthcare giving circle for the past five years.