California Hospital and Multi-Payer Partnership

Through the California Hospital and Multi-Payer Partnership (CHAMP), five California health plans have joined together to collectively engage lower-performing hospitals with one common goal: to raise performance on high-impact patient safety and quality metrics. CQC serves as the neutral convener and strategic partner, aligning model design and implementation with stakeholder priorities, coordinating outreach and tracking progress over time.

Participating Health Plans

• Health Net
• L.A. Care
• Molina
• Blue Shield of California
• Anthem

Areas of Focus

The collaborative concentrates on a select set of priority metrics that are clinically important and reduce unnecessary costs, including:

• Hospital-acquired infections (CAUTI, CLABSI, C. diff, MRSA, SSI-colon)
• Sepsis management (SEP-1)
• Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade
• NTSV C-section rate
• All-cause hospital-wide readmissions

Why these measures

The measures align with quality priorities among other major stakeholders and correspond to preventable harm and costs. This selection of metrics aims to capture a distilled snapshot of hospital quality overall while focusing attention on a narrow set of high-impact opportunities to raise performance.

How the Collaborative Works

Joint outreach to select hospitals common to health plan networks
CQC convenes an annual, individual meeting with leadership from each targeted hospital to review recent performance on priority measures, using publicly reported data and the hospital’s latest internal reports. Attendees may include the quality director, chief medical officer, chief nursing officer, directors of infection prevention and obstetric teams, and in some meetings, the chief executive officer. The CHAMP team may also be joined by partners from Cal Healthcare Compare and Covered California to offer their insights as well.

Discussion about current performance and opportunities
The CHAMP team provides an overview of available reporting on the status of priority metrics and highlights areas of concern and progress. Hospitals share more recent internal data and discuss quality improvement (QI) activities in place, what’s working or lagging and the barriers they face. Together, participants discuss opportunities for near-term actions and the CHAMP team offers referrals as appropriate to proven QI tools, programs or contacts. Key partners in this work include the Health Services Advisory Group, the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and the Hospital Quality Institute.

Follow-through and tracking
Performance is monitored over time through biannual updates that identify progress and persistent gaps with a goal of sustained improvements on the targeted measures.

Time commitment for hospitals: 1–2 meetings/updates per year.