Miranda Wirtz, Senior Primary Care Specialist at OKA, introduced the Health of Primary Care in California Snapshot, a statewide initiative HCAI will lead to track primary care performance across five domains: Investment, Workforce, Access, Quality and Equity. "The purpose of HCAI's primary care snapshot is several fold," Wirtz said, describing aims to create a shared understanding of primary care statewide, track progress toward equitable, high-quality primary care, monitor system-level performance and identify gaps to inform action on access and workforce.

Wirtz said the snapshot will not collect new data but will compile and analyze existing HCAI and external sources and may perform new analysis of those sources. The team has compiled an inventory of over 100 candidate indicators and presented initial inclusion criteria: relevance to California stakeholders, alignment with the five domains, support from California or national data sources, and trackability over time. She cited Milbank's national scorecard and state examples (Massachusetts, New York, Virginia) as models and listed partners including the California Healthcare Foundation, Friedman Healthcare, Mathematica and CHCF for communications.

The snapshot will follow a phased timeline: an HCAI brief announcing the snapshot and approach in early January 2026, a static statewide snapshot report in fall 2026, and a full interactive dashboard release in 2027 with annual updates thereafter. Wirtz said the immediate deliverable is the HCAI Brief on Primary Care, scheduled for the HCAI website in early January 2026.

Work group participants emphasized priorities and challenges. Barbara Rubino of Covered California urged measuring continuity of relationship with primary care providers as an upstream indicator tied to downstream quality and lower emergency-department use. Kevin and others cautioned that a snapshot is a high-level tracking tool and that more detailed, long-term evaluation will be needed to determine whether investments actually change practice-level behavior and strengthen workforce capacity.

Wirtz said stakeholder engagement will include a snapshot advisory group, leveraging existing HCAI advisory bodies, consulting sibling state departments and conducting key informant interviews and targeted outreach to providers and consumer advocates. "We plan to focus on five key domains in the snapshot including Investment, Workforce, Access, quality and Equity," she said, and invited the work group to recommend indicators for inclusion.

Next steps: finalize the indicator inventory, solicit ongoing stakeholder input, publish the HCAI Brief in early January 2026 and continue work toward the 2026 static snapshot and the 2027 interactive dashboard.