Advancing Team-Based Care for the Chronically Ill in Ambulatory Care Settings
Prompted by the
2008 Forum: From Rhetoric to Reality: Advancing Team-Based Care which focused on patient-centered care, the ABIM Foundation partnered with the American Academy of Nursing to assemble a 25-person steering committee tasked with developing a strategy for advancing the use of team-based care for the chronically ill in ambulatory care settings.
In March 2010, the steering committee held a two-day meeting with other leaders in the field to examine the evidence supporting team-based care and to craft a strategy to accelerate the use of teams. This meeting’s outcomes included:
- A white paper co-authored by several participants was discussed at the meeting. The paper reviewed the evidence of the impact of interprofessional, team-based primary care interventions for chronically ill adults, and found that improvements in safety, effectiveness, timeliness and equity are possible with an investment in team-based care. The authors presented their findings at the 2010 IHI Office Practice Summit.
- ABIM Foundation and American Academy of Nursing leaders drafted a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that urged her to consider interprofessional team-based care expertise in her selection of National Health Care Workforce Commission members. The letter drew on evidence from the meeting’s white paper.
Five workgroups emerged from the meeting, focused on:
- Establishing the business case for team-based care;
- Crafting and disseminating the foundational principles for team-based care;
- Distilling inter-professional competencies related to team-based care and encouraging their adoption through professional education, training and certification programs;
- Developing robust measures of effective team-based care; and
- Identifying “best practices” and establishing a learning network to promote rapid diffusion of knowledge about what works.
Many of these efforts are being undertaken in partnership with federal agencies (e.g., The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Health Resource Services Administration) and practice improvement organizations (e.g., the Institute for Healthcare Improvement).
Health Affairs Special Issue
The ABIM Foundation co-sponsored the May 2010 special issue of
Health Affairs entitled, “Reinventing Primary Care.” The issue was accompanied by a press briefing, which was broadcast on C-SPAN and attended by more than 300 stakeholders including Hill staff, policymakers and professional society leaders and resulted in a number of follow-up stories.
Establishing the business case for team-based care; Crafting and disseminating the foundational principles for team-based care; Distilling inter-professional competencies related to team-based care and encouraging their adoption through professional education, training and certification programs; Developing robust measures of effective team-based care; and Identifying “best practices” and establishing a learning network to promote rapid diffusion of knowledge about what works.