The A Team: Electronic Simulation of a Clinical Team Helps Learners Appreciate Benefits of Team-Based Care

02-10-2017 01:19

Team-based care is an innovative strategy for providing high-quality primary care for patients and greater efficiency for the clinical team. Unfortunately, because most students spend a limited amount of time on outpatient clinical teams, it is often difficult for learners to see the “big picture” and appreciate the potential impact for team-based care in optimizing primary care. We developed an electronic simulation of a clinical team so that learners could gain insight into the benefits of team-based care for patients, staff, providers, and health care system. In our virtual team (“The A Team”), the number of hours that the team can work is fixed, as are the number of patients and their health needs. The student must adjust all team members’ time in order to optimize patient outcomes, team workflow, and patient/team satisfaction. For instance, if students assign all patients with chronic care needs to see an MD or NP, they quickly run out of available hours (red frown face appears on screen) and quality of care suffers. However, if learners delegate some chronic care follow up and prevention to the MA and/or health worker, all chronic care patients can be seen, receive follow up/coaching and prevention (green happy face). It is our hope that through these simulations, students will be more astute observers of the team-based care they do (or do not) see in clinical preceptorships and can engage with preceptors and staff by asking thoughtful questions and learning more about future innovations. By engaging students and preceptors in these discussions, we hope to inspire students as future “change agents” in primary care innovation.

Author(s):Margo Vener, MD, MPH; Elaine Lee
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