Worth Repeating

In this transcript excerpt from a September 2007 audio conference, Beth Waterman, vice president of primary care and clinic operations at HealthPartners, describes the development of a care model process that anticipates the needs of patients before they arrive:

“Care Model Process (CMP) is a standard set of workloads for delivering evidence-based care that provides a consistent clinical experience for our patients and a consistent process for the care teams. But, in shorthand, CMP is about standardizing work flows and having the right person doing the right job.

Our model is basically just a stripped-down version of the Ed Wagner Chronic Disease Model. The foundation of CMP is the prepared practice team. The real difference is that the team becomes larger than just the rooming nurse and the provider, and is identified as an official team. They take on additional responsibilities and we pull in extra people as needed, whether it’s the pharmacist or the certified diabetes educator dieticians. The key difference is that involvement of others and their role on the team.

We initiated CMP after we had formed our prepared practice team and made sure that we had those working at our locations. We decided that our work was really about redesigning and standardizing our clinic work flows and then maximizing the roles of all those on the prepared practice team. We operate within people’s licenses, of course, but we do make sure we have the right person doing the right jobs. That can be a challenge, and it continues to be a challenge for us…

…And then, to make sure that we’ve incorporated the best science, we’ve designed our electronic medical record to support the work of that prepared practice team. We needed to bring all of that together into CMP. We needed to make sure that the evidence was embedded into our system. We have expert panels about the disease. We have a diabetes expert panel, a preventative services expert panel and a depression expert panel. Those expert panels develop the content that we need to make sure that it’s embedded into our electronic medical record and into CMP.

To develop and implement CMP, we started with a rapid design session, where we bring some teams together from our pilot sites. We looked at the work flows and designed what we thought were the ideal work flows. For each workflow, we decided what needed to be done, who should do it, and what tools they needed — especially the tools in our electronic medical record to support that task.

In the rapid design session, we had participants from three pilot sites as well as patients and electronic medical record and quality staff. All of those people were sitting around the tables in a two-day session. That’s where we designed those ideal workloads to start us on our path of CMP. We came out of that session with a very basic description of the visit cycles, and we broke the visit cycle down into these components of scheduling, pre-visit, check-in, visit and post-visit. The principles were then to maximize those team member roles and to design the electronic medical record to uphold CMP.”

Source: Building Patient Care Continuity with Prepared Practice Teams, September 19, 2007

Building Patient Care Continuity with Prepared Practice Teams

Already a leader in high quality healthcare, HealthPartners Medical Group wanted another model of care that would improve outcomes even further. During this 45-minute audio conference on CD-ROM, Beth Waterman, vice president of primary care and clinic operations at HealthPartners, described the role of practice teams in her organization's effort to build patient care continuity.

Building Patient Care Continuity with Prepared Practice Teams audio conference is available from the Healthcare Intelligence Network for $197 by visiting our Online Bookstore or by calling toll-free (888) 446-3530.