Although CHCC’s Members represent some of the largest healthcare purchasing organizations in California, individual Members, standing alone, simply cannot assert the kind of persuasive influence necessary to "bend the curve" of increasingly poor healthcare outcomes and the skyrocketing costs.

 
By bringing together small and large purchasing organizations, CHCC gives even the smallest consumer a big voice in the healthcare dialogue.  Areas where this voice has had – and will continue to have – influence include:

• Pay for Quality Improvement (PQI) Programs: Working collaboratively with hospitals, doctors and health plans, CHCC helps inform the dialogue between purchasers and providers to improve the safety, clinical quality and outcomes of care. Our goal is to support each provider to become one of the top 10 percent in the U.S.
  
  
• California Appropriateness Project (CAP): With data continuing to show widespread over-use of medical procedures and under-use of quality care, CHCC is working with Adams Dudley, MD, at the University of California - San Francisco to develop metrics with which to evaluate the appropriateness of physician services. Working with physician organizations, professional societies of medical specialists and selected commercial health plans, CAP aims to build an industry-wide, multi-stakeholder physician evaluation system that will identify and report wide, medically unwarranted differences in clinical practices and engage providers, patients and consumers to improve the use of evidence-based medicine.
  
  
• Commercial Health Plans: CHCC brings our Members together to engage major commercial health plans in the development of industry-wide, multi-stakeholder approaches to performance measurement, reporting and improvement. The principle of “trust but verify” – sometimes referred to as "show me the data" – guides our health plan discussions. Commercial health plans have been organized primarily to sell health insurance, build provider networks, negotiate prices with providers, and pay claims. Because health plan quality management has been a low priority, at best, and because an estimated 30 percent of what we spend for healthcare is spent on poor quality care, CHCC and its Members are pursuing an ongoing role in quality monitoring and improvement.

In addition to the value of participating in an organization that magnifies your voice by adding it to others’ who are also demanding better healthcare at lower costs, so that it can be heard above the industry’s interests, CHCC is working to make available conferences, programming and educational materials that can make your healthcare decisions easier, safer and more effective.  We believe that by doing so, we can save lives, improve treatment outcomes and lower the out-of-pocket costs for healthcare for everyone.