Innovaccer to Help California Unify Data From 16 Medi-Cal Plans

California’s Equity and Practice Transformation (EPT) program, which supports 198 primary care practices across 58 counties, is working to reduce disparities, enhance data capabilities, and prepare primary care practices for value-based payments. The PopHealth Learning Center (PHLC) recently chose Innovaccer’s population health analytics solution to support the EPT program.

In 2024, Innovacer was chosen as the vendor to build the Population Health Management Initiative (PHMI) platform, a program designed to help improve population health in California. That partnership includes the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), California community health centers and Kaiser Permanente.

In September, Healthcare Innovation reported on a presentation by Palav Babaria, M.D., M.H.S., chief quality officer and deputy director of quality and population health management at DHCS, who said the department sees the EPT program as a critical part of its strategy to improve quality and equity for all Medi-Cal members. 

Built on Gravity by Innovaccer and supported by AWS, the solution will aggregate claims data from 16 participating managed care plans, and approximately 2 million Medi-Cal members, into a single source of truth for quality management and tracking of performance. Leveraging advanced HEDIS dashboards, practices will be able to:
• Track and improve quality performance metrics
• Strengthen care coordination for vulnerable populations
• Streamline quality reporting for EPT program compliance
• Support efforts to secure payments tied to performance metrics

“The Learning Center unites purchasers, health plans and primary care practices. We translate policy into practice, align incentives with capabilities, and ensure no one is left behind in the state’s ambitious transformation,” said Jennifer Sayles, M.D., M.P.H., chief executive at the nonprofit Learning Center, in a statement. “By leveraging Gravity by Innovaccer, primary care practices across California will gain unprecedented visibility into performance through a single, aggregated score across all participating plans, calculated for multiple quality performance measures, helping them meet EPT program requirements, earn payments, and improve the lives of millions of Medi-Cal patients.”

During the September presentation, Sayles said, “Moving the needle requires focusing work across the providers, payers and purchasers, with really aligning incentives, data and operations to make things happen. From our perspective, it also requires stepping back and taking a relentlessly practice-centered approach. So if our goal is to change the care that patients and family receive, then we need to really step back into this practice-centered approach. The rest of the system needs to organize around what is needed on the ground, to support practices to change primary care and try to step away from making practices focus on what everybody else wants.”

Innovaccer is working with other government customers as well. In February 2025, it announced a partnership with Sacramento County Department of Health Services to launch the Social Health Information Exchange (SHIE), branded as Sacramento Health Connect (SHC), which will integrate, share, and exchange data across health, criminal justice, and social services sectors.