Dr Farzad Mostashari Discusses Teamwork and Value-Based Care

The future of medicine will be creating partnerships with other providers and other healthcare organizations that are like-minded and looking to enter into value-based modes of care to create networks taht aren't narrow but are coordinated and high performing, said Farzad Mostashari, MD, former National Coordinator of Health Information Technology and co-founder and chief executive officer of Aledade.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What is the importance of teamwork and collaboration for ACOs, accountable care in general, and population health?

Healthcare is a team sport. The average Medicare patient might have 7 difference doctors that they see, and particularly when people get sick, they are bouncing around between acute care, and post-acute care, and emergency departments, urgent care, and imaging, and all this mess without anyone actually being accountable or in charge of the patient's care. So teamwork becomes really essential, but I think the key component of that teamwork is to have a quarterback for the patient to know who's watching out for them, who's coordinating their care. And I believe that is primary care.

That is the appropriate role for primary care and primary care physicians being at the top of their practices and having a team around them to support them so that some of the more routine work gets done by some of their staff, so they can be focused on the sickest patients who have the most demanding challenges.

But that's all within the practice, right? We talk about patient-centered medical home or team-based care. That's within the box and accountable care says, "No, your accountability and your ability to work as teams has to go outside the box to all the different people." And primary care right now doesn't even have visibility into where their patients are going and what is all the care that they're receiving. So that's the opportunity and the challenge when we're talking about teams and collaboration: are there people outside that share your incentives and have shared in your decision to enter into value-based modes of caring, as opposed to churning fee-for-service.

Finding those partners, finding those collaborators in the care of the patient, and constructing networks of care that are not narrow, they're actually coordinated, they're actually high-performing networks: that is the future.