Turning Alignment Into Action: CQC’s 2025 Impact
April 27th, 2026
Across California, the health care delivery system continues to face growing pressure to improve quality, advance equity, integrate care and manage cost—often all at once.
While alignment across these priorities is widely recognized as essential, it remains difficult to implement consistently at scale.
At the California Quality Collaborative (CQC), our focus is turning alignment into action.
For nearly two decades, CQC has served as the vehicle through which health plans, providers and purchasers come together to define shared priorities and implement them in real-world care settings. This means moving beyond agreement to the operational changes that improve care delivery for patients across California.
In 2025, CQC’s programs directly reached more than 900,000 Californians through coordinated improvement efforts, technical assistance and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Across initiatives, this work helped strengthen primary care, expand access to behavioral health services and embed equity into delivery system transformation.
2025 Highlights
- 900,000+ patients reached through CQC initiatives
- Three commercial health plans co-implemented a shared value-based payment model demonstration
- Five Medi-Cal health plans aligned around quality reporting and data infrastructure to reduce administrative burden
- 730,000+ patients served through CalHIVE Behavioral Health Integration provider organizations
- 25.1% relative improvement in depression screening and follow-up, resulting in more than 64,000 additional patients receiving care
- 31 independent practices achieved measurable improvements in blood pressure control, cancer screening and diabetes care
- 12 hospitals engaged in coordinated safety improvement through CQC’s hospital safety work
- Multiple publications and implementation resources released to support statewide learning and adoption
From Strategy to Implementation
CQC’s work in 2025 reflects a continued shift across the health care system—from defining shared goals to operationalizing them.
Across programs, this includes:
- Aligning payment models to support advanced primary care
- Expanding behavioral health integration within primary care settings
- Reducing variation and administrative burden through shared reporting approaches
- Supporting practices with coaching, data and implementation tools
- Advancing equity through targeted improvement strategies
These efforts are helping make alignment usable—creating clearer expectations, more consistent workflows and stronger support for care teams on the ground.
Building a More Connected, Equitable System
From statewide collaboratives to practice-level transformation, CQC’s work is designed to scale what works.
By bringing stakeholders together and supporting implementation at the point of care, CQC is helping build a more connected, equitable and effective health care system for Californians.
Explore the 2025 Impact Report
Primary Care Collaborative Report Highlights CQC’s Role in Reducing Administrative Burden
March 2nd, 2026
The Primary Care Collaborative’s March 2026 report, Simplifying Value-Based Primary Care by Reducing Administrative Burdens, underscores the growing administrative burden facing primary care and its impact on access, quality and clinician capacity.
The report calls for greater alignment across payers, standardization of requirements and shared accountability to reduce complexity and enable more effective value-based care models.
Notably, the report highlights the California Advanced Primary Care Initiative, led by CQC and the Integrated Healthcare Association, as an example of how multi-payer alignment can reduce administrative burden in practice.
Through this initiaive, CQC is actively working with health plans and providers to reduce unnecessary complexity, align expectations and enable primary care practices to operate with greater capacity and capability, allowing teams to focus more time on patient care.
Read Report
Sandra R. Hernández, MD, Named Keynote Speaker for Catalyst for Health 2026
January 27th, 2026
The California Quality Collaborative (CQC) is pleased to announce Sandra R. Hernández, MD, president and CEO of the California Health Care Foundation(CHCF), as the keynote speaker for Catalyst for Health 2026, taking place April 22–23 in Sacramento.
A physician and nationally recognized public health leader, Dr. Hernández brings decades of experience shaping health care policy, affordability and delivery system accountability in California. Prior to joining CHCF, Sandra was CEO of The San Francisco Foundation. She previously served as director of public health for the City and County of San Francisco. In February 2023, Sandra was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the state’s Health Care Affordability Board. From 2018 to 2023, she served on the Covered California board of directors, after having been appointed by Governor Jerry Brown. In 2019, she was also appointed by Governor Newsom to the Healthy California for All Commission.
Read Dr. Hernández’s full biography →
Catalyst 2026
Dr. Hernández’s keynote will open Catalyst for Health 2026, CQC’s annual Forum bringing together leaders, innovators and implementers from across California’s health care ecosystem to share strategies, build relationships and tackle the state’s most pressing challenges. The 2026 Forum will center on the theme Where Ingenuity Meets Impact, exploring how stakeholders can achieve greater impact with limited resources through innovation, collaboration and practical solutions.
The Forum kicks off at the Kimpton Sawyer Hotel in Sacramento with a Welcome Reception on Wednesday, offering health care leaders an intimate opportunity to connect and build relationships ahead of the full-day convening.
Registration for Catalyst for Health 2026 is now open and a limited number of sponsorship opportunities remain available. Explore Catalyst 2026.
Defining Behavioral Health Integration in Advanced Primary Care
January 27th, 2026
A new CQC issue brief synthesizes insights from national and California stakeholders to clarify what behavioral health integration looks like in practice to better support statewide investment and widespread adoption.
Advanced primary care is California’s standard of care, placing patients at the center of every interaction and delivering high-quality care through patient-centered, results-oriented measures. Behavioral health integration is an essential attribute of high-performing primary care practices, where care teams address patients’ physical, behavioral and social needs in a coordinated way.
While there is broad agreement across stakeholders on the importance of behavioral health integration, a key barrier to widespread adoption in California has been a lack of consensus on how it should be defined in practice.
Behavioral Health Integration is Advanced Primary Care
The California Quality Collaborative (CQC) works alongside providers, payers, purchasers and the state to advance behavioral health integration through its Behavioral Health Integration (BHI) Initiative, which includes learning collaboratives, multi-payer collective solutions and technical assistance. This work supports primary care practices as they integrate behavioral health services in ways that are practical, sustainable and responsive to patient needs.
Through this work CQC has observed that a lack of statewide consensus on how BHI is defined and interpreted has made it challenging to incentivize and sustain the clinical work. To address this gap, CQC released an issue brief, Aligning for Impact: A Shared Definition and Multi-Stakeholder Insights on Behavioral Health Integration in California. The paper synthesizes insights from more than 20 key informants across California to clarify what BHI means in practice, and lessons around multi-stakeholder engagement supporting BHI from Colorado, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.
Key Themes from Stakeholder Perspectives
Across interviews with health plans, provider organizations, state agencies and policy leaders, several themes emerged:
- Behavioral health integration is part of advanced primary care.
Stakeholders consistently emphasized that behavioral health services, such as screening, diagnosis and treatment for conditions like depression, anxiety and substance use, are fundamental components of comprehensive primary care.
- Shared definitions matter.
Without common language and expectations, efforts to advance integration risk fragmentation. By embedding the definition in payment models, regulatory frameworks and implementation programs, California can accelerate consistent, scalable and sustainable integration of behavioral health into primary care to advance whole-person care statewide.
- Multi-stakeholder alignment is essential.
No single group can advance behavioral health integration alone. Progress depends on coordination across multiple health care stakeholders and prioritization of their shared goals.
Explore the full issue brief.
The State of Integration: BHI Health Care Leadership Summit
CQC will host the BHI Health Care Leadership Summit September 16-17 in San Diego, convening health care leaders from across the delivery system to advance integration of behavioral health into primary care and move from shared understanding to concrete, statewide action. Be part of the Leadership Summit.