Challenges at the intersection of team-based and patient-centered health care: insights from an IOM working group

Team-based health care may help the United States achieve improved health and improved health care at a sustainable cost.1 It is central to many reforms of health care delivery, both actual and proposed. Team-based care can occur in many settings (eg, home, office, hospital); focus on different problems (eg, specific diseases); and include team members with a variety of backgrounds. Health care teams can be large or small, centralized or dispersed, virtual or face-to-face, and their tasks can be focused and brief or broad and lengthy. This extreme heterogeneity in tasks, foci, and settings presents a challenge to defining optimal team-based health care.