Care Teams and Workforce Guide

Patients and families are key members of the care team, and you will want to make sure that any substantive changes to how you are delivering care work for them. Involving patients in your care redesign process can help identify challenges upfront. Communicating the new team arrangement and who to contact will help patients make the most of the new system and resources you’re offering.

1. Include patient perspectives on care team changes.

As your organization works through the activities above, there may be opportunities to solicit patient feedback to guide your decision-making. Patient engagement in practice improvement can range from conversations with folks in the waiting rooms about what you’re working on to formal surveys or focus groups. All health centers have patient-majority boards of directors that can be used to offer feedback on new team structures and workflows, and many other practices may have patient advisory groups that can help provide input. The Patient-Centered Interactions Guide from the Safety Net Medical Home Initiative offers pros and cons to different ways of soliciting patient input, as well as guidance for communicating and engaging patients from diverse social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Critical to your care redesign is assuring that patients know who to contact when they need help. For the benefits of relational continuity to persist, patients need to have a small enough team that they can recognize the core care team members as their partners. Working through questions about how patients access services and team members is a great opportunity for meaningful patient feedback.

2. Communicate care team changes.

Helping patients understand the new care team roles can improve how well the teams function and build trust between the teams, patients and their families. From the Safety Net Medical Home Initiative:^[1]

• Practice staff often assume that patients have a shared understanding about appointments, how team members interact and the different roles of medical assistants, nurses and physician assistants. However, these assumptions can be faulty, leading to miscommunication, confusion and mistrust. Patients may not understand what a medical assistant does or why their primary care provider is not taking their blood pressure.

Communication strategies to help patients understand who is on their care team include:

• Verbal introductions from the provider to individual team members.
• Letters for new patients introducing the team.
• New patient orientation programs.
• Care team business cards.
• Waiting room pamphlets with team member names, descriptions and pictures.
• Waiting room bulletin boards or posters describing the care teams.
• Color-coded badges worn by care team members to help patients visually link members of their care team.
• Updates to the practice website, if possible, that reflect care team organization.

Patient communication becomes especially important as your team introduces new functions like social health screening or behavioral health integration, which may include sensitive topics and questions that patients aren’t used to answering in the primary care setting. Explaining why the information is being collected, who has access to it and how the information is used to support improved health and wellbeing is an important part of treating patients with dignity and respect.