Introduction to the New Building the Foundation Implementation Guide Series

On September 1, the Population Health Management Initiative (PHMI) launched the Building the Foundation Implementation Guide Series designed for primary care practices in California to help them get ready for population health management. These guides serve as an organized quality improvement strategy, with the goal of supporting substantive cultural, technological, and process changes that improve population-based care.

Building the Foundation implementation guides

PHMI’s Building the Foundation areas include:

  1. Enhancing capacity to report and monitor key quality measures
  2. Establishing sustainable empanelment operational processes
  3. Building high-functioning care teams to enable population health practice
  4. Developing a business case for sustainability of population health management activities

The guide series was co-designed with input from community health centers (CHCs) and Regional Associations of California (RACs), practice coaches, and subject matter experts who lay the groundwork – also known as Building the Foundation – for effective implementation of population health management for a selected population. The guides are intended to meet the needs of PHMI’s geography-based cohort of 32 CHCs, all working to improve quality metrics and address disparities, improve patient engagement and experience of care, and increase access to primary care services through team-based care. The guides can also be used by primary care practices who would like to increase their population health management capacity working independently or with their own coaches.

In 2024, PHMI will launch a Patient-Centered Population-Based Care Implementation Guide series that provides step-by-step guidance for approaching evidence-based population health management for each of the populations.