Building Alignment Across Payers

As CQC continues initiatives to define and scale Advanced Primary Care, collaboration with stakeholders across California is crucial to building alignment, increasing investment in primary care and accelerating adoption of value-based payments.

To support that goal, CQC joined California Health Care Foundation’s (CHCF) Primary Care Investment Coordinating Group, which brought together public and private health care purchasers, policymakers, analysis and improvement specialists, consumer advocacy organizations and funders, to develop and coordinate primary care investment strategies and activities.

• The group has established a set of guiding principles and recommended actions intended to spur collective effort to increase resources that will help provide and improve primary care in California.
   
• These principles and actions have been collected in a newly launched Primary Care Matters resource center, and are built upon CQC’s Advanced Primary Care attributes.

Scaling Advanced Primary Care 

• Crystal Eubanks, PBGH’s Senior Director of Care Redesign and CQC, highlighted California’s multi-stakeholder approach to advance health outcomes, access and equity through our Advanced Primary Care initiatives at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health's Strengthening Primary Health Care webinar (Crystal's talk begins at 49:30). California’s example, alongside many others across the nation, is being used to inform planning of federal policy and programs dedicated to strengthening primary care.
   
• Crystal also joined Shruti Kothari of Blue Shield of California’s Industry Initiatives and Assembly member Adrin Nazarian of Southern California’s District 46 at the 2022 Northern California State of Reform Health Policy Conference to discuss how statewide data sharing and coordination can be leveraged to improve collaboration, scale innovations and advance health equity and outcomes.

CHOC Health Alliance Leveraging Advanced Primary Care Standards

CHOC Health Alliance, a physician hospital consortium is using   CQC’s Advanced Primary Care standards to develop a tiered network.

• CHOC focused primarily on practices that demonstrate competencies aligned with the standards and willing to further invest in advanced services and care coordination.
   
• While still in its early stages of implementation, CHOC plans to reward practices that meet expected quality outcomes by increasing capitation payments.

If you would like to learn more about CHOC’s plans to leverage the Advanced Primary Care standards, email Dr. Michael Weiss, vice president of population health at CHOC Health Alliance, at mweiss@choc.org.

Advanced Primary Care:
Piloting Practice-Level Measurement

CQC hosted a webinar highlighting PBGH’s Advanced Primary Care measurement pilot.

CQC and the Integrated Healthcare Association (IHA) have brought together four large purchasers in California to pilot a set of stakeholder-vetted performance measures that emphasize patient experience and outcomes of care. 

Behavioral Health Integration:
Telehealth Promising Practices

Wednesday, May 25
1:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m. PT

Join us for a webinar highlighting on-the-ground lessons about behavioral health integration into primary care and opportunities for effective virtual care.

• Ellie Lopez, director of integrated health services at Borrego Health, will share Borrego Health's experience integrating behavioral health into primary care and operational examples of hybrid virtual and in-person care driving integration. 

CQC’s New Steering Committee Members

We are excited to welcome three new members to the CQC Steering Committee:  

• Dr. Palav Babaria, chief quality officer and deputy director of quality and population health management, California Department of Health Care Services
• Dr. Hector Flores, medical director, Family Care Specialists Medical Group/Altais Clinical Services
• Gavin White, market president, Aledade

Partner Resources

California Improvement Network

• The organization developed a new toolkit to advance racial health equity in primary care. Access the toolkit here.
   
• Healthforce Center at UCSF (home to the CIN program office) is taking applications for the fifth cohort of the Cedars-Sinai Community Clinic Initiative: Managing to Leading (M2L), a part-time leadership program for mid-level clinicians and non-clinical staff from community clinics in Los Angeles.

Collaborative Healthcare Patient Safety Organization

• Join a May 18 webinar on May 18 at 11:00 a.m. PT to discuss strategies to increase hospital-birth center collaboration to improve community birth transfers. Click here to register.
  
  The PBGH Transform Maternity Care program worked with an expert panel of California physicians and midwives to develop resources to support this presentation. 

Primary Care Collaborative

• Watch a recent webinar featuring an expert panel discussing proven strategies for increasing patient-matching to primary care practices and how purchasers and payers can increase the share of enrollees with a usual source of care.