The dissolution of healthcare's silos has the potential to change the way care is delivered by reducing provider burnout and decreasing no-show appointments.
Brighton Ncube, senior vice president of physician practices and ambulatory care at Kingman (Ariz.) Regional Medical Center, connected with Becker's to discuss "one of the great disruptors in healthcare" and the benefits of team-based care.
Note: This response has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Brighton Ncube: Over the years, you find that healthcare has been siloed with each department operating on its own. There was no really seamless care coordination. Now you find that we have moved more into team-based care or coordinated care treatments in such a way that all of the providers involved in the treatment of a patient know what is going on, what medications the patient is taking. Also, we are doing more medication reconciliation so that we don't overmedicate people or things like that.
So team-based care has been one of the great disruptors in healthcare and [I'm] really excited that people are really beginning to work as teams first of all. And secondly, people are working together to develop seamless workflows so that there is efficiency in the delivery of healthcare and that people know what the other team member is doing.
Also, there is equal distribution of work because as you develop integrated care, you want to make sure that all the workloads are balanced. That is going to go a long way in terms of addressing staff burnout. As you saw during COVID, a lot of our healthcare workers burn out, and that really affects the delivery of care, leading people to resign or to be uninterested in working for us.
With team-based care approaches, the exciting part is that patients are familiar with their care providers. We empanel patients to those teams and that reduces no-shows. … It's a team that is well coordinated and it is a panel of patients. Because of that continuity, the patients know the team members, they are free with them, they can freely express how they feel with those team members instead of holding back and a patient feeling like, "Oh, I can't say this," or they feel like they are a visitor in the clinic or something to that effect.