Equity-centered Health System Improvement Projects – Lessons from Three Initiatives

People with low incomes and from racial/ethnic minority groups regularly face barriers to accessing primary care and behavioral health care. These obstacles include limited provider networks, challenges finding language-concordant providers, and challenges accessing the technology needed to take advantage of telehealth.

From 2020 to 2023, CCHE focused on equitable access to care as they conducted evaluations of three California Health Care Foundation-funded initiatives addressing these challenges:

• Cultivating Outcomes through Equity in Behavioral Telehealth (COE-BT) centered on strengthening access to behavioral health for underserved communities.
• Delta Center California (DCC) connected behavioral health and primary care leaders to improve integration, foster collaboration, and strengthen California’s safety net.
• Connected Care Accelerator – Equity Collaborative (CCA EC) prioritized improving telehealth access for patients facing digital barriers in primary and behavioral health care.

CCHE recently shared lessons learned from our evaluations across all efforts in a Grantmakers in Health blog post. Looking across these projects revealed how equity strategies can be adapted to different settings and consider more broadly applicable lessons learned for future initiatives. This cross-initiative approach reflects CCHE’s commitment to advancing equitable care by turning complex learning into practical guidance for funders, implementers, and policymakers.