by Healthforce Director Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP

Boasting a new program office, a strong slate of partners, and a refreshed agenda of focused topic areas, the California Improvement Network (CIN) is working with renewed energy and excitement to accelerate the spread of innovation in care delivery. Established 13 years ago by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), CIN is a community of health care professionals committed to driving improvements in patient and provider experience and population health while lowering the cost of care. As the only network in California that brings together commercial and safety-net provider organizations, health plans, and quality improvement groups, CIN fosters valuable cross-sector relationships across the state.

In September 2017, CHCF selected Healthforce to serve as the program office for CIN. Healthforce provides strategic and operational support to the network.

In February 2018, CIN announced the selection of 17 partners, including provider groups and coalitions, health plans, and quality improvement organizations. Collectively, these organizations serve or support more than 20.6 million patients statewide — more than half the population of California.

Accelerating the Spread of Innovation in Five Critical Areas

To achieve its goals, CIN will focus on five critical topic areas in 2018 and 2019:

• Making improvements in behavioral health care, with an emphasis on cost management
• Addressing social needs that affect health, with an emphasis on cost management
• Understanding the fundamentals of managing financial risk and the cost of care
• Preventing burnout and promoting provider and staff resilience
• Leading change

CIN will facilitate connections and collaborations among health care leaders throughout the state and develop resources and other programming to enable them to adopt leading-edge practices in quality improvement. Partners will participate in design and strategic planning to ensure that these topics remain relevant to the network and that CIN is creating effective programming and resources.

CIN’s first 2018 partner meeting and report, CIN Connections: Healing the Healers, focused on steps health care leaders can take to reduce provider burnout, promote a culture of wellness, and ultimately improve patient outcomes. The first meeting, report, and resource kit identified actionable ways to promote provider well-being along with examples of tools and techniques from leading health care organizations.

Next Steps for CIN

The next partner report, which will be released in summer 2018, will focus on the social needs that influence health, with an emphasis on managing risk and the total cost of care. CIN is also developing a work group on behavioral health integration for discussion at the September partner meeting. Additional resources on all five topic areas will be released in the coming year.

Join Our Campaign to Spread Innovation

Are you doing innovative work in any of the above topic areas that you’d like to share with the network? Email us your stories so we can spread better ideas for care delivery throughout California.

To stay up to date on CIN programming, subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll deliver the network’s quality improvement resources, tips, and tools to your inbox.

About Sunita

Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP, is the director of Healthforce Center at UCSF. For over a decade, she has been engaged in transformational leadership in health care with a special focus on emerging leaders and inter-professional training.