Understanding declining vaccine rates and how to reverse them is critical to improving public health and an important priority for Blue Shield of California. With more than 39 million residents, getting it right in our state requires a transparent, collaborative, and data-driven approach — one well-aligned with Industry Initiatives’ focus and expertise. It also requires responding nimbly and precisely with the information learned through stakeholder collaboration.
The PHACT Coalition
Blue Shield of California is part of the Public Health for All Californians Together (PHACT) Coalition. If you’re not already familiar, the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) launched PHACT in September 2025 to bring together a network of multi-sectoral partners across the state of California to provide timely, evidence-based guidelines and culturally appropriate health messaging to protect the health and advance the well-being of all Californians. The Coalition is led by CDPH, with support from Covered California and UCSF’s Collaborative for Public Health Research (CPR3).
We’ve taken a significant role chairing the PHACT Coalition Data & Implementation Working Group, which supports the Coalition by equipping public health leaders with actionable, data-driven insights to improve vaccination rates within their communities. In addition to Blue Shield, the group members include Anthem, Stanford, and the California Pan Ethnic Health Network.
While activities are still underway, here’s a snapshot of the work in action.
A Data-Driven Approach to Public Health
To identify a solution, it’s critical to first outline the challenge. Historically, health data systems in California have not reliably captured nor exchanged vaccine data in a way that’s useful for public health initiatives like this. As one of our initial steps, the working group sought to identify workarounds to this problem, including an effort to leverage a broad set of data and analyses of Blue Shield claims to provide early insights for the group. This helped the team understand the scope of data quality issues and vaccine-specific insights, including whether declining rates are due to poor access to care or vaccine skepticism. It also revealed opportunities to improve data infrastructure, capture, and consolidation, giving the working group clear next steps.
Effective Strategies and Interventions
The second goal of the working group focuses on synthesizing evidence on interventions to improve both the supply and demand of vaccinations. By combining health plan data with evidence-based strategies to address specific issues in different regions, the working group is identifying methods that have worked for different challenges. For example, an approach will vary significantly based on whether lack of vaccination is due to access, hesitancy, or even confusion, and will also be different depending on the specific, unique community. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. While work is ongoing, one key finding to date has revealed that consistent access to a primary care provider is linked to higher vaccination rates for children, especially for our most vulnerable populations.
Supporting Better Health Outcomes
The last step of the working group’s focus is perhaps the most important one: How do we share these learnings with communities across the state, empowering everyone in health care and public health to apply what works and improve vaccination rates?
As this work progresses, we at Blue Shield are focused on using the information this work is teaching us even sooner. In partnership with the California Quality Collaborative (CQC), we will be applying what we’ve learned from the working group along with our own data insights to more effectively help the communities we serve. By year-end, CQC will implement these evidence-based strategies in pilot sites, and after that, we will publish findings and provide actionable data to community leaders by early 2027. We hope to grow and scale that initiative in 2027 and beyond.
We know that collaboration and partnership are essential to solving any major public health issue, and maintaining immunity to vaccine-preventable disease is no different. With multiple stakeholders invested in the future of public health, we’re looking forward to a critical shift that brings together more resources, expertise, and evidence-based approaches to advance a shared goal: better health outcomes for all Californians.
