Cheshire Medical Center and The Center for Health and Wellness at Keene State College are both trying out a new organizational method called team-based care.
Sandie Phipps, senior director of development and communications at Cheshire Medical Center, oversees the staff at the clinic that participates in team-based care.
“It’s been a very successful model and given the challenges heading into the future of the shortage of primary care physicians, I see this continuing,” Phipps said.
Team-based care is a growing idea that has received feedback from both patients and staff.
“We’ve actually had positive feedback from patients and for many years we’ve had nurse practitioners . . . Who have had panels of patients as well as the primary care physicians, so I think as we’ve actually expanded this we’ve had very positive feedback,” Phipps said. Phipps said that the Medical Center has close to 100 team members caring for family medicine patients and it’s predicted that by the year 2020 there will be 47,000 fewer primary care physicians.
“We actually were able to help exceed the national standard and improve the number of patients who have their hypertension under control and we were one of nine national organizations nationally last year to receive an award. It’s called the Million Hearts Award from the Centers for Disease Control and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare cervices,” Phipps said.
Like Cheshire, The Center for Health and Wellness at Keene State College uses similar methods of team-based care to improve patient care and administrative stress.
“We had a significant increase in usage of the services, so in the fall we had twenty-percent more people coming for service than we’ve had in the past. That made the current operating procedure evidently inadequate,” Director for Center of Health and Wellness at KSC, Christine Burke said.
Susan Nelson, a nurse at KSC, said the new system was much needed because the old system was hard for both the students and the nurses. Students would not make an appointment, they would just walk right in. This caused an influx of students and not enough time or providers to help each student.
“It has made a huge difference. I think that it has made the clinic run more smoothly in that they work is more equitable across everybody opposed to the old way it used to be,” Nelson said.
Before, students could walk in and be triaged — but it was never actually a walk-in clinic. Now, there is a set block of two hours a day, alternating between morning and afternoon, making their team-based care approach more effective. The Center for Health and Wellness offers a variety of services, but is limited to short work hours. Different from the Center for Health and Wellness, the Medical Clinic is open all day.
“The problem is that most students don’t have a primary care in the office so they cant really be seen by the clinic at the Medical Center. They can only be seen by the emergency room,” Burke said.
Keene State College created their form of team-based care to avoid such problems. The Center for Health and Wellness is now designed to see and treat as many patients as possible now, whereas before, the Center for Health and Wellness had limited time and doctors available. Both the clinic at Cheshire and The Center for Health and Wellness has seen improvements in patient care and administrative care.
“So, you know, we’re working on it constantly. It’s always a work in progress when you start something new to see what’s working well, what isn’t working well, and its assessment, which goes along with the whole college philosophy,” Nelson said.
Tara Levy can be contacted at tlevy@kscequinox.com