Outcome Measures for Effective Teamwork in Inpatient Care: Final Report

Addresses one step in the process of moving from teamwork training to teamwork practices that improve outcomes of care: identifying outcomes that are most likely to be affected as teamwork practices improve in an implementing organization. Discusses a literature search, methods for selecting and testing candidate measures, measures highly rated by clinical experts, and results of measure testing on administrative data of the DoD health system.
The Department of Defense (DoD) has been one of the leaders in actions to improve teamwork, which it has pursued with the goal of achieving safer care and reducing adverse events for patients served by its military hospitals. DoD and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) have worked together to develop tools that can be used to evaluate how improved teamwork in delivering care is achieving safer outcomes for its patients. In 2004, AHRQ modified its Patient Safety Evaluation Center contract with RAND to add an analytic study to identify and test measures that have the potential to capture improvements in teamwork practices. The funding for this study was provided by DoD through an Interagency Agreement with AHRQ.