Facilitating improvement in primary care: the promise of practice coaching.
Practice coaching, also called practice facilitation, assists physician practices with the desire to improve in such areas as patient access, chronic and preventive care, electronic medical record use, patient-centeredness, cultural competence, and team-building. This issue brief clarifies the essential features of practice coaching and offers guidance for health system leaders, public and private insurers, and federal and state policymakers on how best to structure and design these programs in primary care settings. Good-quality evidence demonstrates that practice coaching is effective. The authors argue that primary care delivery in the United States would benefit from a more systematic approach to the training and deployment of primary care practice coaches.
Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, USA. kgrumbach@fcm.ucsf.edu
Kevin
K
Grumbach
Emma
E
Bainbridge
Thomas
T
Bodenheimer
D002170:Canada; D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D005194:Family Practice / Q000193:education; D006801:Humans; D009426:Netherlands; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care; D010821:Physicians, Family / Q000193:education; D011216:Practice Management, Medical / Q000458:organization & administration*; D010818:Practice Patterns, Physicians' / Q000458:organization & administration*; D011320:Primary Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D058996:Quality Improvement / Q000458:organization & administration*; D011787:Quality of Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006113:United Kingdom; D014481:United States