Teamwork: The Cornerstone for Medical Home Improvement

Medical home improvement results occur as a product of teamwork. Teamwork involves a set of skilled cross-disciplinary interactions that are learned, practiced and refined to provide better care delivery management, promote safety, and enhance outcomes.

Highly functioning teams are made up of those on the “front lines of care”, they engage family partners, have the capacity to test changes quickly, and possess the resilience to deal with the complexities of primary care. Teams require the benefit of support from their administrative leaders.

Such supported teams are able to gain practice wide buy-in for their improvement innovations and other procedural changes, which ensures success. Teamwork is the fundamental skill set underlying effective medical home improvement.

Form a highly functioning, multidisciplinary, medical home quality improvement team and take the following steps:
This material may help prepare you to meet the NCQA PPC-PCMH elements , , & .

Steps Towards Better Teamwork
  • Practice habits of highly functioning teams (make the commitment, gain and demonstrate leadership, use ground rules for communication, secure facilitation, set an agenda as a team, keep minutes, assign and complete home work; and follow up)
Agenda Form Minutes Form
  • Include, at a minimum, physician leadership, family/consumer representation, and one or two key members of the primary care practice (such as a practice manager and perhaps a nurse who can develop the practice capacity for care coordination). Invite ad hoc members or others expressing interest.
  • Meet regularly (for example, twice a month for 60-90 minutes) to continuously evaluate and improve the management and facilitation of medical home care processes
  • Articulate a clear vision for medical home improvement and experiment with tests of change performing multiple plan, do, study act cycles
PDSA Cycles
  • Engage and share ideas with all staff for input, participation and when ready, implementation.
  • Continually report progress to the entire practice cultivating teamwork and improvement.