The PCMH Experience – Together Everyone Achieves More

December 31, 2014 · Mina Harkins

How healthy are the teams at your practice or at the practices you work with? Patient-experience assessments are well established—what’s lacking are employee-experience assessments or measures of “teamness.”

We Hear You

A post to our digital community asked for examples or sources of such tools—to no avail. The 2018 PCMH Annual Reporting requirements include an option to report employee experience results, but no practices have selected that option so far. This prompted removal of the option for the 2019 PCMH Annual Reporting Requirements for Team-Based Care.

Teamwork

This should not be taken as a sign that the collective responsibility of the team to provide and work in an environment of trust and respect in the ongoing care of patients is being down-played —practices must address several core criteria regarding Team-Based Care. And don’t forget that a directed team is included in the framework of the Joint Principles of the Patient-Centered Medical Home. But where can you look for help in building and maintaining more-effective teamwork?

Together Everyone Achieves More

Greg Bell – Together Everyone Achieves More

At the PCMH Congress this year, I had the opportunity to introduce our keynote speaker, Greg Bell, author of Water the Bamboo: Unleashing the Potential of Teams and Individuals. His inspiring talk, “Together Everyone Achieves More: How Teamwork Impacts Patient Care” underlined how essential teamwork is to thriving in today’s workplace.

I didn’t take a lot of notes because he had my full attention—and ensured that we remained engaged by asking questions such as, “What are you thankful for and what went well today?” He helped everyone in the audience understand how supporting each other and building deep connections over the long term can yield surprising results. (One attendee even learned to juggle—or at least learned how to work on becoming an accomplished juggler.) We can point to those achievements as measures of a healthy culture of teamwork, in a practice and in other endeavors. Click here to see highlights from a similar talk by Greg Bell.

I wonder:

• How often do you see practices that take the time to create a supportive environment?
• What techniques have you employed? Do you use retreats, or have a speaker or coworker lead a discussion on a book like Greg’s?
• Are you asking good questions?
• Do you have achievements in teamwork to share?