PRIMARY CARE: How to improve patient care and reduce physician burnout using teams and teamlets

A practice model intended to improve the delivery of primary care services by using teams of clinicians is described in this editorial by Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer, co-founder of the Center for Excellence in Primary Care.  The model is based on stable teams  in which the same people work together consistently and patients get to know the team as a team.  The smallest building block is a teamlet, a core team, which is staffed as one clinician and one or two or three medical assistants.  There are also extended care teams with other types of staff (such as pharmacist, physician therapist, among others) who support perhaps 3 or 4 teamlets.  This model has been implemented at Bellin Health (WI), the University of Colorado Health System, and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN.  Among other advantages of this model is that physician satisfaction has been found to increase because of reassignment of data entry to other staff.

Source: Bodenheimer, T. (2019, July). Building powerful primary care teams. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 94(7), 1135-1137. Click here for free full text:  https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196%2819%2930484-7/pdf  Posted by AHA Resource Center (312) 422-2050 rc@aha.org