Best Practices in Delivering Team Based Care in a Telehealth Care Environment

An unintended outcome of COVID 19 was an acceleration to practice transformation in the area of Telehealth, while continuing to leverage the full team. An important aspect of team-based care has always been the co-location of the primary and extended care team members. However, upon the necessity to meet patient’s needs virtually; clinical and operational leaders of health centers had to re-envision the care delivery; including staff roles and responsibilities, operational workflows, policies and procedures, and other aspects of care. In this program, we will discuss how to leverage health center strengths and build upon those strengths in moving to a virtual health center. We will review each role on the interdisciplinary care team and discuss their importance in a successful re-implementation of team-based care in the virtual world. Roles reviewed will include: medical assistant, provider, registered nurses, behavioral health staff, non-clinical team members, and the re-assignment of staff to support this larger model. This will include a discussion of the role of an interdisciplinary executive leadership team that includes Chiefs of Medicine, Nursing, Behavioral Health and Dentistry to work together to seamlessly transition and recover from clinical, operational and financial challenges due to crises such as COVID 19.