November 1, 2007

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Western Health Advantage, a health maintenance organization owned partly by UC Davis Health System, has been named as one of “America's Best Health Plans” by U.S. News and World Report and the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

The magazine's and NCQA's third annual list, released this week, ranks more than 500 HMO and point-of-service plans and is in the Nov. 5 issue of U.S. News and World Report. The rankings were released to coincide with open enrollment season in November, and include data on about 550 commercial, Medicare and Medicaid plans. They also identify an additional 150 plans that chose not to submit data to the NCQA.

The rankings are based on plans' performance on a range of measures: 50 for commercial plans, 28 for Medicare plans and 35 for Medicaid plans. The measures address areas such as member satisfaction, preventive-care delivery and treatment appropriateness. The performances of commercial plans were scored on a scale of 1 to 5 and converted to overall scores that determined their rankings. The highest possible score is 100.

Western Health Advantage received a score of 81.2 to rank 177 on the list. The company is a full-service, not-for-profit health-care plan operating in the counties of Sacramento, Yolo, Solano, Western El Dorado, Western Placer and Colusa (for CalPERS only). In addition to UC Davis Health System, other owners of Western Health Advantage are Catholic Healthcare West Sacramento and NorthBay Healthcare System.

Representing UC Davis Medical Center on WHA's Board of Directors are the board's chair, Nabil Musallam, Senior Associate Director, Clinical Operations, Managed Care and Contracting; Ann Madden Rice, CEO of UC Davis Medical Center; and Phillip Raimondi, medical director of the UC Davis Primary Care Network.