Blue Shield of California Collaboration

From inception, CHCC has recognized that we must focus our purchasing power on the problems of high prices and provider-driven overuse, misuse and under-use of health care services. While our membership currently represents over 3 million Californians, even this leverage is insufficient to bring all of the major health plans into alignment with CHCC’s values and goals. CHCC therefore decided to seek one commercial health plan willing to work fully as a partner in the development of HMO and PPO networks that are higher quality, more transparent, and more cost-effective.

This decision led to a year-long process in which CHCC developed its health plan partnership criteria and met with four of the major commercial health plans – Blue Shield of California, Blue Cross of California, Health Net and PacifiCare – to discuss a new way of doing business that would involve CHCC as an equal partner in efforts to monitor provider performance, assure and improve quality, and stabilize costs.

CHCC selected Blue Shield to reinvent the conventional health plan-purchaser relationship in partnership with CHCC. In July 2007, CHCC and Blue Shield signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) unique in California. We have agreed jointly to improve health care quality and affordability through a unique purchaser-payer collaboration to develop high quality, more cost efficient networks.

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