Practices that take a team-based care approach to treatment are seeing higher quality of care numbers, lower rates of acute care use and lower actual payments, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Here's what you need to know.
1. Brenda Reiss Brennan, of Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City, conducted a study to measure patient outcomes, healthcare use and the cost of team-based care practices. She compared that data to traditional practice management data.
2. The research included 113,452 patients and accounted for 163,226 person-years from 27 team-based care practices and 75 traditional practices.
3. The study found that team-based practices had higher rates of active depression screening compared to traditional practices, 46.1 percent to 24.1 percent. They found that team-based practices adhered to diabetes care bundles at a higher rate, 24.6 percent to 10.5 percent. Documentation of self-care plans were also higher, 48.4 percent to 8.7 percent. There was a lower proportion of patients with controlled hypertension in the team-based group, 85 percent to 97.7 percent.
However there were no significant differences in the documentation of advanced directives, 9.6 percent to 9.9 percent.
4. Rates of healthcare use were lower for team-based practices than traditional practices for emergency department visits, 18.1 to 23.6 per 100 person-years, hospital admissions, 9.5 to 10.6 per 100 person-years, ambulatory care visits, 3.3 to 4.3 per 100-person years and primary care physician encounters, 232.8 to 250.4 per 100 person-years.
5. Payments were lower among team-based care practices $3,400 to $3,515.
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