This is the second in a series of three posts. Please stay tuned for the last post that unpacks the purpose of this work further.
By Andrea Estes
Sexual and reproductive health programs innovation manager
Washington State Health Care Authority
In the first post, we explored why person-centered measures—like the Person-Centered Contraceptive Counseling Survey (PCCC)—are essential to modern, responsive family planning policy. Measuring access alone is insufficient. The next step is action: using patient experience data to improve care, reduce disparities, and strengthen accountability. This is where democratizing health care data becomes critical.
Democratizing health care data means breaking down silos so that patient experience, outcomes, and research data are accessible and usable by patients, providers, payers, policymakers, and researchers. When done well, this approach supports more personalized care, increases transparency, improves efficiency, and accelerates improvements. This is the direction Washington’s Health Care Authority (HCA) is pursuing through its Family Planning Only (FPO) program.
In 2024, HCA piloted the Person-Centered Contraceptive Counseling Survey – Retrospective (PCCC-RS) within FPO. In partnership with the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program and the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services’ (DSHS) Research and Data Analysis team, HCA surveyed more than 500 FPO clients, ultimately receiving 150 responses from individuals who had received services within the prior six months. These responses served as a real-world use case to help UCSF validate the PCCC-RS for endorsement by the Partnership for Quality Measurement (PQM).
Validation matters. It ensures the survey metric is scientifically sound, reliable, and applicable for use by states, health plans, managed care organizations, and federal accountability programs. Without validated tools, patient experience data accuracy would be uncertain, at risk of dismissal—or worse, misused.
The PCCC-RS aggregates responses into a single “top score” metric: the percentage of respondents who rated all four survey items as “excellent.” Those items ask whether, during contraceptive counseling, providers respected patients as people, listened to what mattered to them, took their preferences seriously, and gave them enough information to make the best decision about their birth control method. Last year, 47 percent of Washington’s FPO clients rated providers all four survey items as “excellent”, with many additional respondents selecting “very good” or “good.” HCA interprets these results positively and recognizes the provider community for delivering high-quality care.
However, beneath the aggregate score additional analyses suggests systematic challenges for participants who were younger, lower income, non-English speaking, and racially/ethnically diverse. By survey item, the lowest-scoring area was whether patients felt they received enough information to make the best decision for themselves. These findings point to targeted opportunities for improvement that access-based metrics alone cannot reveal.
State agencies cannot address these gaps on their own. Improving person-centered care requires strategic, well-resourced partnerships with providers, health plans, researchers, and community stakeholders—partners who are willing and able to use the data to drive change.
Beginning in 2026, HCA will implement the PCCC-RS in FPO for three years, establishing a baseline and enabling the agency to monitor client feedback over time. The agency intends to work with external partners interested in responsibly leveraging these data to support quality improvement, reduce disparities, and strengthen a patient-centered ecosystem for family planning care in Washington.
The policy opportunity now is to ensure these data are shared, analyzed, and acted upon in ways that meaningfully improve care for all people family planning programs are meant to serve. Person-centered data is not the finish line—it’s the starting point to necessary refinements to the system.
Organizations interested in responsibly leveraging Person-Centered Contraceptive Counseling Survey–Retrospective (PCCC-RS) data to support quality improvement efforts are encouraged to contact the HCA Family Planning Only program.
To learn more about person-centered reproductive health measurement, visit the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program at the University of California San Francisco.
Additional information about Washington’s Family Planning Only program is available on the HCA website.