Design and Implementation of a Physician Coaching Pilot to Promote Value-Based Referrals to Specialty Care

Abstract

This physician mentoring program aimed at reducing specialty referral rates is feasible and acceptable in primary care settings. Increasing the appropriateness of referrals has the potential to provide patient-centered care, reduce costs for the system, and improve physician satisfaction.

Peer-to-Peer Support Interventions for Health Care Providers: A Series of Literature Reviews

“…Sample sizes of the studies ranged widely from four to 1,559 participants. This included six studies that included ten or fewer participants; often, these were qualitative interviews assessing the experiences of individual participants with the peer-to-peer interventions (Tuzzio et al, 2017;Reyes Ortega et al, 2019;Agarwal, Brooks and Greenberg, 2020;Schwartz et al, 2020;Barron, Abdallah and Heltne, 2017;Boyle and Kochinda, 2004;Fox, 2010). We also identified four studies that reported on more than 1,000 participants that had access to the program (Tamers et al, 2011;Pisarski et al, 2006;Greenberg et al, 2010;.…”

“…In a second step, we tested the content validity and usability of the framework. For this step, we abstracted framework elements from a subset of publications (Beckman et al, 2012;Chen et al, 2016;Dyess and Parker, 2012;Eagle, Creel, and Alexandrov, 2012;Edrees et al, 2016;El Hechi et al, 2020;Fornari et al, 2018;Fox, 2010;Graham et al, 2019;Gray-Toft and Anderson, 1983;Lewis et al, 2017;Marks et al, 2017;Mayer et al, 2014;McDermott, Brook, and Ben-Isaac, 2017;Merandi et al, 2017;Mills and Mullins, 2008;Mundt, 2001;Olson et al, 2016;Olson et al, 2015;Palamara et al, 2015;Peterson et al, 2008;Pololi et al, 2002;Ripp, Fallar, and Korenstein, 2015;Rohatinsky, Cave, and Krauter, 2020;Schwartz et al, 2020;Shanafelt et al, 2017;Shoji, Benight, and Stearns, 2016b;Tuzzio et al, 2017). The selected publications used to test the developed framework all addressed interventions, and these were evaluated in a broader health care setting.…”

“…Among the 27 peer-to-peer health care intervention studies, coaching was seen as the peer leader role alone in two studies (Shoji, Benight, and Stearns, 2016b;Palamara et al, 2015), with mentoring in one study (Tuzzio et al, 2017), and with emotional debriefing in one study (Shanafelt et al, 2017) as described above, for a total of four studies.…”

“…In some cases they were matched with the mentee based on gender or on being a member of an under-represented community. In our test set, mentoring was seen as the peer leader role alone in four studies Fox, 2010;Mills and Mullins, 2008;Mundt, 2001), was combined with facilitation in three studies (Chen et al, 2016;Dyess and Parker, 2012;Files et al, 2008;Lewis et al, 2017;Lewis et al, 2016;Mayer et al, 2014;Rohatinsky, Cave, and Krauter, 2020), and with coaching in one study (Tuzzio et al, 2017) in the 27 reviewed studies. Mentoring programs may include activities carried out in dyadic or group sessions.…”

Measuring integrated care at the interface between primary care and secondary care: a scoping review

“…A mixed methods study by Tuzzio et al examined the impact of education at the interface in the form of “peer coaching” on specialty referrals (Tuzzio et al , 2017). All participants reported benefit of peer discussion on patient care.…”