Over the last few decades, there has been a significant growth in the measurement and reporting of health care quality outcomes. As health care evolves, it is important to continue to monitor and report on the quality of care delivered to patients in California and across the US. This is part of a series of measures CHCF is publishing on the quality of care in our state. Topics range from maternal to end-of-life care, and include measures on behavioral health, chronic conditions, and patient safety.

This set of quality measures highlights California’s performance across a range of chronic conditions, including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory disease, and includes data by race/ethnicity, payer, and county. The charts below provide a look at these data.

Chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes, and heart disease were the leading cause of death and disability in the United States. In California, high blood pressure was the most common chronic condition, affecting more than one in four Californians.

While white women in California had the highest incidence of breast cancer, African American women had the highest mortality rates. African American and Latina women were less likely to have their breast cancer diagnosed at an early stage than Asian and white women. Patient survival is higher when cancers are diagnosed at an early stage.

In California, nearly 700 hospitalizations per 100,000 people were potentially preventable through access to high-quality outpatient care, based on a composite measure of hospital admission rates for eight chronic care conditions. The overall preventable hospitalization rate varied from a low of 216 in Alpine County to a high of 1,417 in Glenn County.

The companion Excel data file, which provides these data, links to each data source, and more, is available for download below. These materials are part of CHCF’s California Health Care Almanac, an online clearinghouse for key data and analyses describing the state’s health care landscape. See our entire collection of current and past editions of Quality of Care and Californians with Chronic Conditions.