The health-care industry is the fastest growing sector of the U.S. economy, with annual revenues projected at over $1.6 trillion (that’s 12 zeroes!).68 And health care has surpassed manufacturing and retail as the largest source of jobs in the United States,69 now employing more than 18 million workers.70 Many challenges face the health-care industry, including changing laws/regulations, changing technologies, an aging population and increase in chronic disease, and labor shortages (physicians and nurses). But the goal is still the same—efficiently and effectively provide quality (appropriate and timely) health care to patients. Given the challenges, health-care organizations are looking for better ways to do this.
And one way is through using a “team-based care” approach, which research studies have shown can improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.
Many hospitals, clinics, and medical practices have adopted this team-based care approach. What does that entail? A patient receives care from a team of medical professionals who divide up responsibilities for performing tasks that traditionally would have been done by a person’s primary physician. Although supervising physicians still manage (oversee) patient care, tasks such as completing prescription refill requests, adjusting medication dosages, helping manage chronic diseases (e.g., teaching someone diagnosed with diabetes how to take blood sugar counts and to administer insulin), and other routine tasks are now done by a team of health-care providers. For instance, at Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest not-for-profit managed health-care companies in the United States, a new program model called “complete care” was designed to enable health-care staffers to work together to make sure that no patient concern, need, preventive action, or matter was missed or overlooked.71 As one individual described, staffers often literally chased patients down hallways to get them to schedule needed screenings. But the team approach is working. After a number of years using this model, research on Kaiser’s team model showed significant gains in patient medical care across a wide range of standardized measures. Getting to that outcome wasn’t easy, however.
Departments that were accustomed to working on their own now had to work together. Instead of focusing on their own specialties, a team of specialists now worked together to provide patients with a well-rounded health-care experience.
Physicians had to be retrained to view themselves as part of a team, supported by other professionals such as nurses, assistants, and other staff. As the health-care environment continues to be challenging, is teamwork the Rx?

Discussion Questions 

1. What challenges are managers of health-care organizations facing?
2. How would the way health-care organization managers manage be different in a team-based model?
3. Explain how roles, norms, status systems, and group cohesiveness might influence the success of a team-based model.
4. What are some reasons you think a team-based model has led to improved patient outcomes and reduced costs?
6. In the chapter, we brought up the idea of teams sharing too much information. Would this be a more serious ethical issue for teams in health-care organizations? Why or why not?