Characterizing Teamwork in Cardiovascular Care Outcomes: A Network Analytics Approach.

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Management
• Medical Informatics
• Health Services Research

Background:

• Teamwork in healthcare is complex, requiring interdisciplinary provider collaboration.
• Shared patient encounters are crucial for successful healthcare teamwork.
• Assessing working relationships by patient outcomes offers insights into provider interactions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To characterize the intensity of healthcare provider working relationships.
• To identify provider pairs with significantly higher than expected patient satisfaction.
• To demonstrate a novel metric for quantifying collaboration strength.

Main Methods:

• Extracted 4 years of patient, provider, and activity data from an inpatient cardiology unit.
• Created a provider-patient network to identify joint participation in patient encounters.
• Developed and applied the 'shared positive outcome ratio' to assess provider relationship strength based on risk-adjusted outcomes.

Main Results:

• Identified 188 collaborative relationships with significantly higher patient satisfaction than expected.
• A group of 22 providers demonstrated exceptional patient satisfaction performance.
• Observed high variability in collaboration scores across the network.

Conclusions:

• Provider collaboration satisfaction varies across teams.
• Team collaboration can be quantified using composite measures.
• Tracking provider outcomes can inform quality improvement strategies for team staffing and care processes.