Resource Center

The Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Innovation Center) to test innovative payment and service delivery models to reduce program expenditures under Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and to enhance the quality of care that Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) beneficiaries receive. CMS is testing more than 20 models under this authority that create new incentives for clinicians and organizations that deliver medical care through CMS programs to deliver better care at lower cost.

The adult primary care “physician shortage” is more accurately portrayed as a gap between the adult population’s demand for primary care services and the capacity of primary care, as currently delivered, to meet that demand. Given current trends, producing more adult primary care clinicians will not close the demand-capacity gap.

The science of team training in healthcare has progressed dramatically in recent years. Methodologies have been refined and adapted for the unique and varied needs within healthcare, where once team training approaches were borrowed from other industries with little modification. Evidence continues to emerge and bolster the case that team training is an effective strategy for improving patient safety. Research is also elucidating the conditions under which teamwork training is most likely to have an impact, and what determines whether improvements achieved will be maintained over time.

Throughout this century there have been many efforts to reform the medical curriculum. These efforts have largely been unsuccessful in producing fundamental changes in the training of medical students. The author challenges the traditional notion that changes to medical education are most appropriately made at the level of the curriculum, or the formal educational programs and instruction provided to students.

Team-based interprofessional practice plays a central role in new models of care delivery. However, training health professionals for interprofessional practice remains a challenge. Centers for Interprofessional Education (IPE) exist at many academic institutions but have had limited success. The authors conducted telephone interviews with 12 leaders of academic centers for IPE, identified through a key informant method. Qualitative analysis of interview notes for common themes of barriers, successes, and insights.

Purpose: This article examines literature on interdisciplinary education and teamwork in health care, to discover the major issues and best practices.

Methods: A literature review of mainly North American articles using search terms such as interdisciplinary, interprofessional, multidisciplinary with medical education.

The Interprofessional Care Access Network is an innovative model for academic-practice partnership providing care coordination for vulnerable and underserved clients and populations in identified neighborhoods. Interprofessional student teams, including health professions students from nursing, medicine, pharmacy, and dentistry, collaborate with community service organizations and primary care clinics to address social determinants of health identified as barriers to achieving health care outcomes and Triple Aim goals.

This paper examines the kinds of organization problems existing in community based delivery settings and then identifies several ways of looking at organizational functioning. These methods are applied to the identified organizational problems. Finally, the author discusses some implications for the curricula of medical and professional schools concerned with the education and training of health workers for the practice of social medicine.

The model discussed in this article divides the population into eight groups: people in good health, in maternal/infant situations, with an acute illness, with stable chronic conditions, with a serious but stable disability, with failing health near death, with advanced organ system failure, and with long-term frailty. Each group has its own definitions of optimal health and its own priorities among services.

Interprofessional education (IPE) aims to improve patient outcomes and the quality of care. Interprofessional learning outcomes and interprofessional competencies are now included in many countries' health and social care professions' accreditation standards. While IPE may take place at any time in health professions curricula it tends to focus on professionalism and clinical topics rather than basic science activities. However generic interprofessional competencies could be included in basic science courses that are offered to at least two different professional groups.