Provider Team
What is it?
A "Provider Team" provides clinically meaningful services at one or more points in a patient's journey (emergency, admission, transfer, consultation, etc.) through an inpatient encounter.
Provider Teams
Connect Care expresses the organization of health services within facilities using inpatient "Provider Teams". These roughly correspond to the hospital service caring for a patient, while allowing for more than one group(s) within a service, or across different services, to participate in patients' care. Within a general surgery service, for example, there may be teams that take turns admitting patients, other teams focused on consulting, and yet others providing specific types of care (e.g., trauma service). "Treatment Teams" and "Provider Teams" are synonymous.
A provider team:
is usually specialty-specific;
can be facility-specific but can also reference to a team covering multiple sites;
can be unit-specific but is most helpful when a team's patients can be spread across multiple units;
is easily viewable from the Patient Lists activity ("Available Lists") and within the patient chart (Patient Storyboard, Sidebar, etc.);
offers an way to find and sort patients followed by a specific group within a specialty service (e.g., Wound, Ostomy, Chronic Ventilation, Home Parenteral Therapy Consults);
works well for groups of clinicians whose members can change or rotate;
helps on-call colleagues be aware of all patients assigned to the relevant colleague's team;
is widely available, unlike "My List" patient lists (viewable only by the owner or those with whom the owner shares); and
is NOT the same as a specialty's "New Consults" list, which is populated by consultation requests (and automatically trimmed when consult notes are completed).
Primary Provider Team
A "Primary" Provider Team is the team most responsible for a patient's care while in hospital. A patient can have more than one Provider Team participating in care (e.g., admitting team and consulting teams) but only one Primary Provider Team (usually synchronous with the inpatient Hospital Service). Best practice ensures that all inpatients have one or more Provider Teams assigned and that one of those is designated as the Primary Provider Team.
Why does it matter?
Properly maintained, provider team lists can significantly improve the management of provider-patient accountabilities. They:
provide a way to quickly appreciate all the clinical services involved in patient’s care, including the most responsible service, at a particular time during an inpatient encounter;
ensure that groups of clinicians sharing a common accountability are aware of all patients for which they have one or more responsibilities;
avoid the need to create, share and maintain "My Lists" for managing clinical teams; and
avoids the need to constantly add and remove provider members in sync with call schedules and clinical rotations.
Who is responsible?
Clinical business units need to assign provider team management to one or more person(s) or role(s). In some facilities, close associations between provider teams and facility units make it easiest for ward clerks or managers to track patient assignments to provider teams. Clinicians always have the ability to edit those assignments, and it is important that they use the following skills to participate in team list management (especially when patients move between teams as they progress through emergency to inpatient units).
How is it done?
It is important for prescribers to know both how to add a patient–Provider Team attachment and how to remove an attachment when no longer active. The same tools that allow a team to be added have an option to remove one or more teams.
There are three Patient Teams management workflows that prescribers should be aware of: (1) patient flow, (2) patient lists, and (3) patient charts.
Admission and Transfer
Admitting and transfer (intra-facility or transfer to new unit) workflows may allow for selection of an accountable Provider Team, and this is one of the ways by which Provider Team lists are populated with patient names. Discharge and transfer events automatically remove patients from team lists. If one is not sure of the correct assignment at admission, these fields can be skipped as they are not "hard stops".
Patient Lists
A folder listing all available Provider Teams appears within each facility system lists folder. These system lists can added to one's favourite lists. They also can be dragged and dropped to any "My List" to automatically populate that list with the Provider Team patient assignments.
A right-click menu is available within all Patient Lists, giving options for assigning and removing patients from the Provider Teams available in a facility. In addition, an "IP Provider Info" list column block (by default in lists based on the "++AHS IP MD PATIENT MANAGEMENT TEMPLATE++") can be added to any My List. This column gives double-click access to quick-editing of provider teams from within patient lists.
Patient Charts
All opened charts have a Patient Storyboard (left-most panel), where the current attending provider is identified about midway down the panel. Hovering over this section will open a pop-up information bubble that names any assigned Provider Team. Clicking (selecting) this section will open a pop-up editing tool that facilitates the addition or removal of Provider Team assignments, as well as selecting one as the Primary Provider Team.
The chart Sidebar (right-most panel) is topped with an Index of sidebar links that includes one entitled "Encounter Team". Selecting this will switch the Sidebar view to list details about the providers and teams assigned to the patient, including a section with Provider Team details.