Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Blue Shield of California Foundation Intimate Partner Violence Community of Practice

Building health care systems that better support survivors

Intimate partner violence affects a large share of Californians and shapes long-term health outcomes in profound ways. Medi-Cal managed care plans are uniquely positioned to respond. They reach nearly nine in ten Medi-Cal members and connect those members to the primary care providers, community organizations, and supportive services that survivors rely on. The Population Health Learning Center (The Learning Center) is partnering with Medi-Cal managed care plans and Futures Without Violence to build the systems, training, and partnerships that make a trauma-informed response possible at scale.

Project At A Glance

Timeline

April 2025- September 2026​​

Project Stage

Implementation

Partners

Futures Without Violence

FUNDER

Blue Shield of California Foundation

Learning center services

Core elements of our program and strategy

  • Plans are working in a facilitated Community of Practice, learning from our experts, and working holistically to share key learnings, best practices, and strategies that will ultimately make an impact. ​
  • Plans are aligning their workplans with existing MCAS measures & DHCS priorities. For example, Blue Shield of California is focusing their workplan on the DHCS birthing care pathway & Kern Family Healthcare is aligning their IPV strategy to well child and pre/postpartum MCAS measures.​​
  • Plans are centering trauma-informed training in their IPV strategies. For example, CalOptima seeks to conduct training for 50+ practices on universal IPV education, screening and response. ​ ​​
  • Plans & PHLC are engaging with survivors and community advisory groups to embed survivor voice in policies, trainings & workflows. ​
  • Plans are building in privacy protections and consideration for survivors, i.e. ensuring IPV ICD-10 Z codes are not shared on EOBs.​
  • Plans are integrating their IPV strategy in the SDOH operations

What’s happening now

Participating managed care plans are working together in a Community of Practice to design how their provider networks identify and respond to intimate partner violence. Plans are co-designing universal education for primary care providers, strengthening privacy protections and referral pathways, and building meaningful partnerships with community-based domestic violence organizations and survivors with lived experience. Plans are also working with practices in their networks to test and refine the approach before scaling it more broadly. The work explicitly centers communities most affected by intimate partner violence, including communities of color where prevalence is highest.

What we’re learning

This work is most durable when it sits inside existing care management and CalAIM workflows rather than alongside them as a separate initiative. Plans that have made the most progress are those that have invested early in input from survivors and community partners, treated privacy infrastructure as a starting point rather than a downstream concern, and built provider training that addresses the real discomfort clinicians often feel when introducing screening. The Community of Practice has been most valuable as a space where plans compare implementation choices in detail with peers facing the same operational decisions. The approaches and lessons learned will be captured in a statewide implementation toolkit, developed with Futures Without Violence, that other California managed care plans can use to launch similar work.

To top