Applied Evidence
Turning team-based care into a winning proposition
Team-based care can go a long way toward improving patient outcomes. This review—with accompanying tips and resource lists—can help.
Patients who underwent team-based care interventions had greater SBP control (defined as <140, or <130 in patients with diabetes mellitus or chronic kidney disease) than the control group in trials involving nurses (8 trials; odds ratio [OR]=1.7; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.5-1.9), trials conducted in community pharmacies (5 trials; OR=2.9; 95% CI, 1.8-4.6), and trials incorporating pharmacists into primary care clinics (9 trials; OR=2.2; 95% CI, 1.8-2.7).
Team-based care improves lipid control
An RCT of 6963 patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in 9 clinics examined the proportion of patients receiving team-based care that achieved a target low-density lipoprotein (LDL) of ≤100 mg/dL compared with patients receiving usual care.3
Clinics were randomized to participate in team-based care (defined as a physician-pharmacist team in which the pharmacist reviewed the medical charts of patients with elevated LDL and then developed individualized, evidence-based treatment recommendations) or usual care, which involved access to a disease management program providing automated quality reporting, benchmarking, and care opportunity decision support.
Over 2 years, the team-based care model had significantly more patients with a lower LDL, more patients at LDL goal, and more patients on lipid-lowering medication (TABLE3).