Improving medical care for patients with chronic disease requires reaching physicians early in their careers. From 2006 to 2008, the California HealthCare Foundation supported the California Academic Chronic Care Collaborative (CACCC), which worked with 19 residency training teams from nine California academic medical centers to make changes to their clinical and education programs, aiming to reflect a greater focus on chronic disease.
The CACCC is a partnership of the Institute for Improving Clinical Care of the Association of American Medical Colleges, and the Improving Chronic Illness Care Initiative of the Center for Health Studies at Group Health of Puget Sound led by Dr. Ed Wagner.
The collaborative’s participants included 267 residents and 100 faculty, along with nursing and pharmacy staff. While most teams focused on diabetes, some chose hypertension, and one chose hepatitis care. Registries were created to track patients; 4,500 patients were entered in these registries by the conclusion of the project.
The academic medical centers, selected through a request for proposals process, included:
- Alameda County Medical Center
- Harbor-UCLA Medical Center
- Santa Clara Valley Medical Center
- Stanford Hospital and Clinics
- University of California Davis
- University of California Los Angeles
- University of California San Diego
- University of California San Francisco (UCSF)
- UCSF/San Francisco General Hospital
Further information on the CACCC is available below:
- An audio report hosted by California Healthline;
- An editorial from the Journal of General Internal Medicine (JGIM); and
- A special supplement of the Journal of General Internal Medicine supported by CHCF. Published in October 2010, the 82-page JGIM supplement "Chronic Care and Education" summarizes the experiences from the California and national academic collaboratives, and provides tools to evaluating clinical and educational change.