Data Resources

Resources that help consumers navigate, use, and interpret HCAI and other related healthcare data.

How is HCAI data used?

The California Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI) collects and manages data from dozens of health plans, thousands of health facilities and prescription drug manufacturers, and tens-of-thousands of healthcare workforce practitioners and produces a variety of tools to make the data useful and meaningful. HCAI also produces a variety of datasets, visualizations, and reports to make data useful and meaningful to improve quality of patient care in California.

What we want to achieve with our data and products

  • Know our clients and understand their needs.
  • Turn data into information and meaningful insight to inform patient care and quality improvement.
  • Support informed decisions that advance safe and quality healthcare environments.
  • Reduce challenges that occur in the collection and use of data.
  • Help organizations receive data more efficiently.
  • Provide data tools to enhance the work organizations are already trying to achieve.

How do I submit data?

Various healthcare entities submit data to HCAI for processing through secure, online data systems.

Submit Data

What data can be requested?

HCAI receives data requests from colleges and universities, state and federal government agencies, media, healthcare entities, private companies, and non-profit organizations. Requests for data can be made for non-public data that may not be available on the HCAI website.

Request Data

How is HCAI data protected? 

HCAI has collected, managed, and successfully protected sensitive and confidential health data for decades. HCAI ensures that the security, privacy, and confidentiality of consumers’ individually identifiable health information is protected in a manner consistent with state and federal privacy laws. All Californians are afforded a constitutional right to privacy and the state has long led the nation in developing robust privacy and security standards to protect personal information, particularly when it comes to information regarding individual health status. Consistent with this philosophy and history, a core principle is that protected sensitive and confidential health data managed by HCAI is used to learn and provide information about healthcare systems and populations at large, not individual patients. Only authorized individuals have access to these data.

The technology systems used to manage and store protected, sensitive, and confidential health data are administered with strict security and privacy procedures and controls, which include: regular mandatory role-based security and privacy training for all employees and contractors; encryption of data while in transit and at rest; strictly enforced least privileged access controls; rigorous back-up and recovery of data; and logging of all actions performed at the administrative, database, and application levels. These procedures and controls are overseen by HCAI’s Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Privacy Officer and comply with industry, state and federal standards. Security and privacy policies are reviewed annually and overseen by security governance that includes executive management and subject matter experts.

Release of protected, sensitive health data is tightly controlled by regulation and policy. Requestors seeking data from HCAI must first be approved and then follow strictly governed application processes, which include signing a Data Use Agreement (DUA). The HCAI DUA describes appropriate safeguards through “Required Practices for Safeguarding Access to Confidential Data.” Guidance is also included regarding security incident and data breach management and reporting; how to handle Business Associate Agreements; data record retention periods; and data destruction requirements. The HCAI DUA further explains appropriate Requestor data usage and aggregate reporting requirements for HCAI data, which comply with the CalHHS Data De-Identification Guidelines. The agreement also ensures that the Requestor and their Contractors are compliant with HCAI standards and requirements as outlined in the DUA. Failure of the Requestor to comply with all terms of the HCAI DUA can result in termination of the agreement and may subject the Requestor to legal action by the State. Separately, state entities are subject to a similar process memorialized in the California Health and Human Services Interagency Data Exchange Agreement.

Finding HCAI Data

You can navigate the HCAI website to find data in several ways:

Visualizing Data

HCAI produces visualizations and other reports and products. These products provide context to make data more useful and accessible.

Map of California with color coding by county showing the percentage of physician supply by preventable hospitalizations for asthma. This is an example.
View Featured Visualizations

Why Use Risk Adjustment?

California Health and Safety Code Sections 128745 – 128750 require HCAI to annually publish risk-adjusted healthcare outcome reports on nine procedures and medical conditions including at least one risk-adjusted outcome report for coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG), transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), or other interventional cardiovascular procedure.

The risk-adjustment methodologies for CABG and TAVR are developed by HCAI and approved by the HCAI Clinical Advisory Panel. For all Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) quality indicators reports, HCAI reviews and modifies the risk-adjustment models developed by AHRQ to apply them to California’s patient population.

Adjusting for the risk of patients is necessary to ensure fair comparisons between facilities. Facilities treating sicker patients are more likely to experience high adverse outcome rates than those facilities treating healthier patients. Accounting for variations in patients’ severity of illness by giving more weight to sicker patients, creates a level playing field when comparing performance across facilities.

Consider an example where Facility X and Facility Y have similar observed mortality rates. Factoring in the severity of patient illness reveals that Facility X treats a higher-risk patient population than Facility Y (as indicated by expected mortality rates). Consequently, after adjusting for patient risk, the mortality rates diverge: Facility X now has a lower mortality rate, while Facility Y has a higher mortality rate. Thus, Facility X receives an overall performance rating of “Better”, while Facility Y receives a performance rating of “Worse”.

Total CasesDeathsObserved Mortality RateExpected Mortality RateRisk-Adjusted Mortality RatePerformance Rating
Facility X 330319.414.26.5Better
Facility Y746719.57.113.2Worse

Reporting observed mortality rates alone, may inaccurately suggest that facilities are performing equally. Applying risk-adjustment methods provides a more accurate representation of facility performance by accounting for differences in patients’ severity of illness.

HCAI offers a range of risk-adjusted outcomes reports:

These reports provide valuable insights into performance across various conditions and procedures, empowering healthcare facilities and policymakers to drive improvements in patient care and outcomes.

CalHHS Open Data Portal

The California Health and Human Services Agency (CalHHS) has launched its Open Data Portal initiative in order to increase public access to one of the State’s most valuable assets – non-confidential health and human services data. Its goals are to spark innovation, promote research and economic opportunities, engage public participation in government, increase transparency, and inform decision-making. “Open Data” describes data that are freely available, machine-readable, and formatted according to national technical standards to facilitate visibility and reuse of published data.

The portal offers access to standardized data that can be easily retrieved, combined, downloaded, sorted, searched, analyzed, redistributed and re-used by individuals, business, researchers, journalists, developers, and government to process, trend, and innovate.

HCAI participates by uploading its public datasets to the CalHHS Open Data Portal so that they are co-located and accessible with other CalHHS data.

CHHS Open Data Portal Healthcare Data

Data Analytics Public Reporting Plan

HCAI publishes a list of the analytics products plans to publish by measure, topic area, and the quarter which HCAI is project product release.

View Public Reporting Plan