Background: There is a natural assumption that quality and efficiency are optimized when providers consistently work together and share patients. Diversity in composition and recurrence of groups that provide face-to-face care to the same patients has not previously been studied.
Objective: Claims data enable identification of the constellation of providers caring for a single patient. To indirectly measure teamwork and provider collaboration, we measure recurrence of provider constellations and cohesion among providers.
Design: Retrospective analysis of commercial healthcare claims from a single insurer.
Participants: Patients with claims for office visits and their outpatient providers. To maximize capture of provider panels, the cohort was drawn from the four regions with the highest plan coverage. Regional outpatient provider networks were constructed with providers as nodes and number of shared patients as links.
Main measures: Measures of cohesion and stability of provider constellations derived from the networks of providers to quantify patient sharing.
Results: For 10,325 providers and their 521,145 patients, there were 2,641,933 collaborative provider pairs sharing at least one patient. Fifty-four percent only shared a single patient, and 19 % shared two. Of 15,449,835 unique collaborative triads, 92 % shared one patient, 5 % shared two, and 0.2 % shared ten or more. Patient constellations had a median of four providers. Any precise constellation recurred rarely-89 % with exactly two providers shared just one patient and only 4 % shared over two; 97 % of constellations with exactly three providers shared just one patient. Four percent of constellations with 2+ providers were not at all cohesive, sharing only the hub patient. In the remaining constellations, a median of 93 % of provider pairs shared at least one additional patient beyond the hub patient.
Conclusion: Stunning variability in the constellations of providers caring for patients may challenge underlying assumptions about the current state of teamwork in healthcare.