Effective care teams one of the backbones of value-based care. At Landmark Health and ConcertoCare, I've had the privilege of leading interdisciplinary teams to achieve our care goals. I don't claim to know everything, as I’ve learned so much from other leaders and colleagues, and there are books and entire professions dedicated to these topics—but my hope is that sharing some of my real-world experiences working in healthcare will help others as they navigate these challenges.?
I believe that if you set clear goals for your team, point them in the right direction, and constantly work to remove barriers to their success, you will have great outcomes. This article highlights some tips I've learned about how to set clear goals for your clinical teams.?
1. Performance Metrics?Establishing clear performance metrics is vital for leading and tracking the team’s progress. In a clinical setting, it's not just about setting business objectives; the best results come when business and clinical objectives are in sync with each other, ensuring that each objective makes sense from both angles. Here are key strategies that have worked for me:?
- Combining Individual and Team-Based Metrics:?Metrics should reflect both individual contributions and team-based performance. This approach fosters collaboration and accountability within the team. This blend may vary depending on the stage and size of your company, as well as reporting capabilities and sophistication. The system should not be over-designed and ideally incorporate metrics/KPIs that are already in use.?
- Aligning Incentives:?As someone who has worked extensively in value-based care, I am a huge proponent of aligning all incentives between providers, patients, and the company. When day-to-day activities directly connect to value-generating activities for both patients and the company, the impact is much greater. For example, timely chart closure drives many upstream activities such as documentation, quality gap closure, communication, and coordination with other providers, as well as enabling appropriate care delivery.?
- Identifying What to Incentivize:?Take a mix of things to incentivize, using a combination of experience and evidence that incentivizing certain behaviors works. Metrics based on timing or volume often feel more abstract and less directly connected to personal interactions. These metrics, such as chart closure, visit kept rate, phone call volume, and cancellations, are typically straightforward to measure and incentivize, making them good starting points if performance needs improvement.?
- Stability in KPIs: While flexibility is necessary, stability in KPIs is crucial. Creating metrics that can be easily applied to different contracts and markets improves their stability. This approach allows for only minor tweaks to the underlying calculations or goals, rather than constant changes. It highlights the importance of planning for the future and sticking with those decisions. Consistent metrics allow team members to focus, understand the nuances, and see progress, whereas constantly adding or changing metrics can create a sense of instability. Thoughtfully tying new initiatives to existing metrics and smoothly integrating new metrics ensures effectiveness and clear guidance for team members.
- Using Industry Standards and Ensuring Compliance:?Utilize industry standard reporting for healthcare and value-based care industries. Be sure to stick within regulatory frameworks and guidelines, and ensure your legal/compliance team has reviewed and approved any financial incentives.?
- Preparing for Questions and Complaints:?With any incentive plan, you will encounter questions, complaints, and disagreements. Align across the organization to ensure a consistent response. People pay close attention to things that affect their compensation, especially in healthcare, where there are many opportunities to go above and beyond and get sidetracked.?
2. Recruitment and Onboarding?Recruiting the right team members is crucial. If you have built the right team structure to deliver the outcomes you want, it should be a smoother road to recruiting the right team members with those skillsets. Here’s my approach:?
- Hire with Clarity:?Provide candidates with as much information as possible (respecting proprietary and confidential company information) to help them make the best choice possible. Real scenarios that have tripped up employees can reveal a lot about how candidates react under pressure.?
- Collaborate with Recruiters:?When you collaborate with recruiters or talent acquisition teams, they become an extension of you. They gather information from the website and company briefings, but it's important to actively shape the process and put your imprint on it. Sitting with your recruiters to help them understand what an ideal candidate looks like can calibrate their search quickly and effectively.?
- Thorough Onboarding:?For clinical staff, I've found that what's often missing is the nuts and bolts of how to do their job. As leaders, we often focus on the mission, the why, the structure, and other high-level objectives and topics. While these are important, we need to remember that if you hire good people, they really want to do their jobs well and will be very engaged in understanding how the day-to-day works. Providing clarity on processes and workflows helps enable their success. However, if the system is too process-heavy and constrained, people start to feel like they have no autonomy. It's important to balance the two, and if your organization is weighted heavily one way or another, to recognize that and hire people who are the best fit for that type of role.?
3. Technology Integration?Once you have defined the key team roles, objectives, and KPIs, take a look at your tech stack. Does your technology enable efficient workflows to meet those objectives? For clinical teams, the EHR is where they live. Evaluate each KPI and how it interacts with your EHR. Don't forget about any external software tools you use. Ideally, you want teams focused on delivering patient care with minimal overhead effort and application switching.?
- Evaluate Your Tech Stack:?Assess each KPI to determine if you have industry-leading solutions in place or if you lag in a particular area.?
- Integrate Tools Effectively:?For example, I encountered an issue where HEDIS measures were not highlighted in the EHR, requiring providers to check another application. If they forgot or were too busy, they missed important opportunities. Integrating those notifications directly into the visit workflow was very impactful.?
4. Patient-Centered Approach?4. Patient-Centered Approach As we build systems, protocols, and workflows, it’s easy to become focused on our own teams' experiences and workdays. However, it’s crucial to stay grounded in delivering a stellar patient experience, both in terms of health outcomes and satisfaction. Keep patient care at the forefront of your conversations and workflows. By doing so, we ensure that the patient remains at the center of everything we do, leading to better health outcomes and higher satisfaction levels.
I’m always eager to hear about others’ experiences and insights. What strategies have you found effective in building and managing value-based care teams? Let's start a conversation—share your thoughts in the comments below!?
Stay tuned for Part 3, where I’ll share insights on leadership and collaboration within these teams.?
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