Putting Advanced Primary Care Into Practice: New Guidance to Support Whole-Person Care

Putting Advanced Primary Care Into Practice: New Guidance to Support Whole-Person Care 

Advanced primary care continues to evolve. 

As patients increasingly present with interconnected physical, behavioral and social needs, expectations for primary care have expanded. Today’s highest-performing practices coordinate care across disciplines, improve access to behavioral health, advance health equity and deliver seamless, person-centered care. 

While these expectations are widely shared, implementing them consistently has often been less straightforward. 

“As a Geriatrician working at the intersection of direct patient care and health system strategy, I’ve seen firsthand how the lack of truly integrated, coordinated primary care drives avoidable hospitalizations, widens disparities, and undermines the promise of value-based care. These attributes provide California’s health systems, payers, and delivery partners with a concrete, actionable blueprint, not just an aspiration, for primary care that meets patients where they are across every dimension of their health.” 

—Parag Agnihotri, MD
Chief Medical Officer, Population Health Services
UC San Diego Health 

The California Quality Collaborative (CQC) developed its Advanced Primary Care framework to establish a shared definition of high-performing primary care and align the stakeholders working to advance it across California. The framework includes a set of attributes that define high-quality primary care and a standardized measure set for evaluating performance. 

Today, CQC is building on that foundation by updating the attributes to better reflect whole-person, integrated care and introducing operational examples that demonstrate how organizations can put them into practice

What’s New

A shared definition is essential. But meaningful transformation happens when organizations can translate shared principles into everyday practice. 

The updated attributes continue to define the core characteristics of advanced primary care. The new operational examples build on that foundation by illustrating practical approaches organizations can adapt based on their patients, staffing models and available resources. 

For example, under the Accessible attribute, the guidance encourages practices to establish protocols for same-day warm handoffs to virtual or co-located behavioral health providers as an initial step toward expanding same-day behavioral health access. Rather than prescribing a single model, the examples illustrate approaches organizations can adapt based on their stage of implementation.  

Supporting Implementation Across California  

The operational examples are designed for practices, health plans, purchasers, policymakers and technical assistance partners working to strengthen whole-person, integrated care. They provide practical approaches organizations can adapt to support implementation and create greater consistency across transformation efforts. 

As primary care continues to evolve, defining advanced primary care is only half the work. Helping organizations operationalize it is equally important. 

Together, the Advanced Primary Care attributes, measure set and operational examples provide a shared foundation for defining, implementing and evaluating high-quality primary care. 

Explore the updated Advanced Primary Care framework to learn more about the attributes, measure set and new operational examples.

Discover how CQC and partners are taking action with this framework through our Payment Model Demonstration Project.