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This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Third Annual Interdisciplinary Team Care Conference, which took place September 10-12, 1981 in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.

Although sweeping claims are often made on behalf of the team approach to health care, and large investments are made in team education for health care professionals, there is amazingly little research available that attempts to connect processes in teams with health care, outcomes. The reasons for this lack of research have to do with problems in conceptualizing and measuring both the properties of teams and the outcomes of team care. In the research of which this report is one part, we attempted to remedy these problems in four ways: (a) We developed ways of measuring dimensions of team care; (b) we developed measures of outcomes of team care; (c) we examined the relationship between processes of team care and patient care outcomes; and, (d) we compared team care to traditional care for similar groups of patients. In this research we examined the measurement of outcomes and compared team care to traditional care.