Presentation
Primary Care Screening Task Ownership: Team Coordination and Organizational Readiness for Implementation
SessionHC9: Healthcare Potpourri
DescriptionPrimary care in the US faces increasing pressure to do more with less time.1,2 Managing over 440 million appointments annually and a wide variety of health concerns, primary care clinicians strive to provide efficient and thorough, high quality care.1–6 Clinical practice guidelines support high quality decision-making and treatment in primary care with current evidence and standards.7,8 However, primary care physicians (PCPs) would need over 26 hours each day to complete all guideline-recommended care tasks and over 7 hours to complete preventive care alone.1,2 To manage this workload, task coordination between PCPs and other clinical staff is crucial to patient and clinician outcomes.
The most common errors in primary care are errors of omission, or missed care tasks, procedures, and tests.9 Designating ownership for a frequently executed task to multiple team members (e.g., medical assistants and physicians are both responsible for ensuring depression screening completion) can improve reliability of patient care and lead to better clinical outcomes.10–12 Without careful planning and coordination, designating tasks to two or more people can also cause confusion about primary care team role responsibilities, and exacerbate burden.13–15 Therefore, understanding the primary care work system factors16 that impact the decision to designate clinical tasks to one or more team members is crucial to improving care reliability and quality, while minimizing burden and errors of omission.
The objective of this study is to examine the organizational work system factors in clinics that have one or two designated owners of a new screening task. In this study, individuals were designated as task owners by role (e.g., PCP and nurse) and ownership was indicated by an explicit commitment from clinic team members to have that role complete the task as a part of their workflow.
The most common errors in primary care are errors of omission, or missed care tasks, procedures, and tests.9 Designating ownership for a frequently executed task to multiple team members (e.g., medical assistants and physicians are both responsible for ensuring depression screening completion) can improve reliability of patient care and lead to better clinical outcomes.10–12 Without careful planning and coordination, designating tasks to two or more people can also cause confusion about primary care team role responsibilities, and exacerbate burden.13–15 Therefore, understanding the primary care work system factors16 that impact the decision to designate clinical tasks to one or more team members is crucial to improving care reliability and quality, while minimizing burden and errors of omission.
The objective of this study is to examine the organizational work system factors in clinics that have one or two designated owners of a new screening task. In this study, individuals were designated as task owners by role (e.g., PCP and nurse) and ownership was indicated by an explicit commitment from clinic team members to have that role complete the task as a part of their workflow.
Event Type
Lecture
TimeWednesday, September 11th1:50pm - 2:10pm MST
LocationGrand Ballroom
Health Care