Management Lessons for High-Functioning Primary Care Teams

Healthcare leaders and managers have only an emerging understanding of how to create high-functioning primary care teams. Management scholars have researched and debated the fundamentals of high-functioning teams over the past few decades in a variety of industries, and it is critical that the primary care providers adopt management teachings to deliver better interprofessional care. This semistructured literature review, grounded in the management and healthcare literature, summarizes and applies relevant team frameworks and best practices from the past 35 years to the current primary care landscape. Relevant management strategies for primary care teams include teaming, working with existing teams, and customer-based teams. The management literature presents a number of recommendations for building successful professional teams, such as re-envisioning goals, promoting shared decision making, communicating effectively and interprofessionally, clarifying roles, learning from failure, and using organizational structures to support multidisciplinary teams. Common barriers include systems-level obstacles to communication and efficiency, hierarchies, lack of time and financial incentives, information and interest asymmetry, and the complexity of working with people from diverse backgrounds. Early adopters of team-based care also offer recommendations. The strategies identified offer healthcare managers insights on common but important primary care topics, such as time-sensitive and interprofessional care, workforce shortages and constraints, and patient-centered care. In addition, this article offers healthcare managers key recommendations on building teams, deconstructing current practice hierarchy, promoting culture change, creating role clarity for healthcare managers and team members, and incentivizing team-based care.