Build a Care Team

If we think about care delivery similarly, we can construct a care delivery model that better uses the skills of each clinician while directing all of them to follow the same approach to bringing a patient to a healthy state. Effective team structure coupled with intelligent and efficient healthcare information technology–driven workflows can deliver high-quality, knowledge-driven care by appropriately skilled clinicians, care that is in tune with the approach and activities of all other care team members.

Equal respect

First, within a care delivery team, each member must receive equal respect for his or her skills and knowledge. Although the physician may know more about medicine overall, each care team member will know more about how to assess or deliver individual aspects of the patient’s care. Failure to leverage each team member’s expertise leads to missed clues about the patient’s condition, ignorance of alternative treatment methods, and errors in judgment derived from decision-making without all the available pertinent facts.

Healthcare information technology can construct the “sheet music” for patient care that lets all team members synergize and collaborate to improve a patient’s condition. Effective clinical decision support software offers a method to provide disease- and patient-specific medical knowledge to every member of the team. By synchronizing this knowledge among clinicians, the care team’s activities and interventions are more likely to be effective.

In addition to medical knowledge synchronicity, the information must fall within an effective and clinician-friendly workflow to increase the likelihood the information will be used by each caregiver at the point of care. Making delivery of medical knowledge a regular, expected, and accepted piece of the workflow allows the flexibility to update that knowledge while not decreasing the probability of its uptake.

Changed yet unchanged

Under this delivery model, the caregiver perceives the changed knowledge as unchanged, as it fits the pattern of information delivery expected in the unchanged workflow. Such an approach could allow the rapid deployment of new medical information in patient care without the need for extensive and often ineffective medical education. The education, training, and deployment all become bonded together in the workflow of every team member.

Although informaticists continue to research the best ways to deploy healthcare information technology, their target group must be a highly collaborative care team formed from multiple disciplines. In addition, attention should be paid to the role of clinical decision support in the development of clinical workflows targeted at entire care teams rather than individual members.

Barry Chaiken is the president of DocsNetwork Ltd. and has more than 25 years of experience in medical research, epidemiology, clinical information technology, and patient safety. He is board-certified in general preventive medicine and public health and is a fellow, and former board member and chair of HIMSS. At DocsNetwork, Chaiken worked on quality improvement studies, health IT clinical transformation projects, and clinical investigations for the National Institutes of Health, UK National Health Service, and Boston University Medical School. He is currently an adjunct professor of informatics at Boston University’s School of Management. Chaiken may be contacted at bchaiken@docsnetwork.com.