Nicole Howard is chief advancement officer for Health Center Partners of Southern California (HCP) and executive vice president of Health Quality Partners, one of four companies in the HCP Family of Companies. HCP is a regional primary care consortium established in 1977 as the Council of Community Clinics and today consists of 17 member organizations, including 13 Federally Qualified Health Centers, 3 Indian Health Centers, and Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest. Collectively, the members of this regional primary care association are the core of the local Medi-Cal health care delivery system, operating over 190 practice sites across 5 counties, that served 722,289 patients with 3.09 million medical, dental, behavioral health, and enabling patient visits in 2021.

For Health Quality Partners, Howard develops and manages collaborative programs and research projects in diverse content areas such as integrated behavioral health, medical-dental integration, clinical quality initiatives, and outreach and enrollment for expanded Medi-Cal and Covered California. She also oversees member services for HCP.  Howard has been with HCP since 2007.

She holds a master’s degree in public health from San Diego State University with an emphasis in health promotion and has been managing public health programs since 1991.

She is serving as a managing partner for the 2023-2024 cycle of the California Improvement Network, a project of the California Health Care Foundation that is managed by Healthforce Center at UCSF.