Equity and Practice Transformation Program
To our participating primary care practices, we’re so excited to have you on the EPT journey.
What is the Equity and Practice Transformation Program?
The Equity and Practice Transformation (EPT) Program is a three-year direct payment program funded jointly by the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). It aims to advance health equity and address COVID-19-driven care disparities, enhancing the health and wellness of enrollees in Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program.
The program began in January 2024 with a diverse cohort of over 200 practices selected to participate. Together, these practices provide care for 2.3 million Medi-Cal enrollees across 52 counties. The majority of participating practices care for patients in communities with less healthy community conditions — as measured by Healthy Places Index (HPI), a powerful and easy-to-use data and policy platform to advance health equity through open and accessible data.
As part of EPT, practices will receive payment for achieving population health management milestones as evidenced by completing specific deliverables. These direct payments are meant to enable the participating primary care practices to implement improvements across their infrastructure, data collection capabilities, and care management processes to promote patient well-being, address racial and ethnic inequities, and deliver whole person care.
As the program office for the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) Equity and Practice Transformation (EPT) program, the Learning Center works to equip all EPT practices with the tools and support they need to achieve better health outcomes for patients and create a more equitable healthcare system for all Californians.
Our work with practices participating in the Equity and Practice Transformation (EPT) program includes:
Co-design with participating practices
We work with practices to understand their pain points, priorities, and goals and to design technical assistance that is responsive to their needs. We refine the technical assistance that we provide based on practices’ changing needs over time.
Facilitated learning
Practices take part in “practice tracks” and “learning communities” with peers from similar organizations, led by a skilled facilitator and content expert. These cohorts serve as a space to apply core content, surface bright spots, raise questions, and build shared commitments to practice transformation.
Better Training, Better Support
Through our eLearning experience, PopHealth+, practices learn and apply knowledge to ensure foundational capabilities across the population health management building blocks. Courses and resources on the interactive hub are available on demand and in multiple formats, including a mobile app and MS Immersive Reader functionality, so that staff members at all practices can effectively learn and engage.
How the Equity and Practice Transformation Program Works
The California healthcare system, particularly for Medi-Cal enrollees, faces challenges that the Equity and Practice Transformation (EPT) program is designed to address. Here’s how it supports primary care transformation at scale:
Aligning care transformation efforts
It’s an exciting and fast-moving time across California’s healthcare landscape, and the success of EPT requires different parts of the healthcare ecosystem to work together. At its core, EPT seeks to use technical assistance and direct practice payments to advance the goals of the DHCS Comprehensive Quality Strategy and Equity Roadmap, the California Advancing and Innovating Medi-Cal (CalAIM) “50 by 2025: Bold Goals,” and the priorities of the California Department of Health Care Access and Information’s Office of Health Care Affordability.
Closing the Equity Gap
Medi-Cal enrollees often experience poorer health outcomes compared to the general population. The EPT program tackles these disparities by focusing on reducing COVID-19 driven inequities and investing in preventive care to address the root causes of health problems, not just the symptoms.
Empowering Primary Care
Limited resources, fragmented quality improvement efforts, and outdated infrastructure prevent many practices from delivering the best care possible. With support for strategic capabilities such as data sharing and care gap reports, the EPT program helps primary care providers across California overcome these limitations to ensure more efficient and effective care delivery.
Shifting Toward Value-Based Care
For too long, the healthcare system has incentivized more care as opposed to better care for patients by paying providers through a fee-for-service or volume-based payment arrangements. As part of a growing movement toward alternative payment models that create a more efficient and equitable healthcare system, the EPT program incentivizes practices to prepare for value-based care contracts that reward quality care and positive patient outcomes.
Annual PhmCAT Assessment
Tracking Your EPT Progress
All EPT participating practices will complete the population health management capabilities assessment tool (PhmCAT) each spring until 2026. Created by a diverse stakeholder group of providers, administrators, health plans and experts, the PhmCAT helps you track your progress in population health management and patient-centered care delivery.
