2019 Quality Care Conference Wrap-Up
CPCA’s 25th Anniversary year kicked off with our Quality Care Conference at the beautiful Hyatt Regency in Santa Rosa, California on February 21-22. Over 280 participants, including Community Health Center Executives, Chief Medical Officers, Chief Information Officers, Clinical Leadership, and health center staff focusing on areas such as compliance and operations, quality improvement, care innovation and Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) gathered to learn innovative ideas and discuss best practices in the areas of Quality Improvement, Health Information Technology, Data and Compliance.
Attendees were offered a wide variety of breakout sessions to choose from. This year’s Quality Care Conference featured even more content than in previous years, as we offered an additional educational track focusing on Health Information Technology.
In celebration of CPCA’s anniversary milestone, the conference materials highlighted the 25th Anniversary theme of “IMPACT” by providing data on how California’s community health centers have had impact over the last 25 years as important economic engines supporting their local economies throughout the state, and also in relation to the impact on the health of their communities.
The conference began on Thursday with an opening welcome from CPCA’s CEO, Carmela Castellano-Garcia, followed by the opening panel on the California Healthy Places Index (HPI). Tracy Delany, PhD and Helen Downing, MPH of the Health Alliance of Southern California demonstrated the HPI tools and showed how they can be used to better understand communities served and prioritize place-based interventions and resources. The case studies showing the use of the tool in the clinical setting were helpful in relating the information presented to the audience.
Thursday’s lunch plenary panel was just as educational and useful. “The Quality Compliance Collaborative in FQHCs: Illustrating the Evolving Model for American Healthcare”, featured speakers Marya Choudhry, MPH, Anne Frunk, CHFP, CPC, and Cris Navarro, JD, CHC all hailing from Shasta Community Health Center. Their presentation focused on an overview of how quality and compliance leaders can work collaboratively and supportively to meet the heightened requirements for administrative and clinical accountability, due to added legislation stemming from the Affordable Care Act.
After separating into the afternoon breakout sessions, the attendees reconvened for the Networking Reception, where they visited with twenty exhibitors and sponsors who showcased their products and services. Attendees made sure to visit each and every exhibitor in their quest to win the prize for the exhibitor bingo game, a Fire HD 10 Tablet. Some would argue that the biggest star of the reception was above and beyond…the risotto bar!
The second day of conference opened with a plenary panel featuring Linda D’Agati, CPHQ, Lisa Perris and Christopher West, PhD all from Open Door Community Health Centers, who presented “Building a Customized Infrastructure for Sustainable Quality Improvement.” They shared their experience on how they developed an infrastructure for quality improvement at ten sites and provided flexible and sustainable approaches to reliably support quality improvement activities across all organizations.
CPCA’s Quality Care Conference closed with a final plenary which highlighted the Transitions Clinic Network (TCN). Shira Shavit, MD, Anna Steiner, MSW, MPH and Joseph Calderon gave attendees background information regarding the impact of incarceration on health, introduced the TCN program, and highlighted their initiative to expand the TCN program to primary care clinics in communities impacted by incarceration throughout California.
The 2019 Quality Care Conference was a great success and CPCA looks forward to welcoming attendees back in 2020 at the Irvine Marriott in Irvine, CA on February 20-21st!