Written by: Diana Hembree

The Community Health Center Network (CHCN) — a network of eight federally qualified health centers — oversees safety net services to 140,000 Medi-Cal patients in California’s Alameda and Contra Costa counties. It does business administration for the centers’ high-quality affordable care to underserved populations, including Latinos, African Americans, Asians and Native Americans. It’s a technology innovation hub. And on top of everything else, CHCN is working furiously to boost the health centers’ HEDIS ratings — a set of quality improvement measures that can translate into better patient health as well as financial rewards.

For years CHCN data analysts have done a lengthy, painstaking quality improvement audit of the HEDIS scores of each individual clinic, but to little avail. By the time the clinics received the audits, it was too late to use that data to boost their annual performance.

Enter Tableau, a Silicon Valley software company that promised a cutting-edge data analytics platform. CHCN, a member of our Technology Hub, hoped fervently that it would provide the solution the health centers had been looking for.