Advancing Team-based Care: A Collaborative Approach
Team-based care (TBC) is an approach to providing holistic healthcare that supports patients by centering them within their care team. This interdisciplinary approach improves patients’ health outcomes and helps clinics increase staff satisfaction, lower costs, and advance health equity.
“A patient is not just a body part that needs to be fixed. It takes multiple interventions from different types of people to support someone ... it takes a village.”
Healthcare clinics in Colorado want better outcomes for their patients, and implementing team-based care is a step toward achieving this aim. However, implementing TBC models presents both opportunities and challenges for clinics.
Many clinics benefit from assistance to effectively implement or enhance their TBC model.
For TBC to be truly effective, it must be grounded in principles of health equity, ensuring that quality care is accessible and appropriate for all.
A significant barrier to TBC adoption lies in the current financing and funding structures within healthcare. Existing practices often make it difficult for clinics to cover the upfront costs of TBC and the ongoing expenses associated with maintaining this care model.
So, from 2020 through 2024, four technical assistance (TA) providers came together to support 16 Colorado-based primary care safety-net clinics to sustainably and equitably implement team-based care. Participating TA providers were JSI, the Colorado Community Health Network (CCHN), Think Equity, and Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF). The initiative was funded by the Colorado Health Foundation.
Much as team-based care yields better results through collaboration, the TA partners’ joint effort amplified one another’s strengths helping clinics achieve greater outcomes. See how NFF collaborated with the other TA providers in service of advancing team-based care in Colorado.
“Having the partnership with NFF has been awesome. We’ve had a lot of opportunities where we have a lot of questions around financials and [we’re] not necessarily sure how to help people navigate that. NFF could come in and they were able to run long reports for us and really help inform our clinics ... They were just really great about being able to respond and give us different tips and tricks to help expand my own knowledge in financials in health centers.”
Throughout the initiative, NFF provided a comprehensive range of financial capacity-building services tailored for the 16 healthcare clinics. For the full cohort, NFF facilitated financial workshops and peer-based trainings on various financial management topics where clinic staff learned and applied fundamental concepts of nonprofit financial sustainability. For individual clinics, NFF provided on-demand financial consulting based on each clinic’s specific and evolving needs. This included everything from acting as a sounding board and advisor to more intensive projects exploring specific financial questions. Projects included looking at the story behind financial trends, understanding cash flow projections, building strategic multi-year budgeting projections and scenario plans, exploring the cost of services, and more. The work was designed to address the specific financial challenges and opportunities faced by these Colorado healthcare clinics.
For more information and to see more videos from this initiative, visit JSI’s page on Advancing Team-Based Care.