Characterizing Teamwork in Cardiovascular Care Outcomes: A Network Analytics Approach.

Background: The nature of teamwork in healthcare is complex and interdisciplinary, and provider collaboration based on shared patient encounters is crucial to its success. Characterizing the intensity of working relationships with risk-adjusted patient outcomes supplies insight into provider interactions in a hospital environment.

Methods And Results: We extracted 4 years of patient, provider, and activity data for encounters in an inpatient cardiology unit from Northwestern Medicine's Enterprise Data Warehouse.

An Outcome-Weighted Network Model for Characterizing Collaboration.

Shared patient encounters form the basis of collaborative relationships, which are crucial to the success of complex and interdisciplinary teamwork in healthcare. Quantifying the strength of these relationships using shared risk-adjusted patient outcomes provides insight into interactions that occur between healthcare providers. We developed the Shared Positive Outcome Ratio (SPOR), a novel parameter that quantifies the concentration of positive outcomes between a pair of healthcare providers over a set of shared patient encounters.