Difficulty: Moderate (requires ongoing effort to make changes stick)
Outcome: A practice that champions and supports patient self-management
Time to Complete: Ongoing
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Expand and Sustain
Steps
Take patient self-management support practice-wide.
If there are other physicians and care teams in the practice, they likely have been watching with interest your team's progress in implementing patient self-management support (PSMS). After they see the benefits of PSMS, they may want to do it themselves. Your care team can serve as a resource for them by sharing experiences, training methods, tools, and best practices.
Brush up on these talking points before discussing PSMS with others in the practice (2-page PDF; About PDFs).
Sustain the change.
Continue to offer training on skills and new tools to keep everyone educated and motivated to provide PSMS. Some practices designate a staff member to serve as the self-management support coach— the person who provides or coordinates ongoing training to keep the team from returning to the old, directive paradigm of care.
Over time, patient self-management support will become your practice's "usual care"— and your patients will benefit.
If there are other physicians and care teams in the practice, they likely have been watching with interest your team's progress in implementing patient self-management support (PSMS). After they see the benefits of PSMS, they may want to do it themselves. Your care team can serve as a resource for them by sharing experiences, training methods, tools, and best practices.
Brush up on these talking points before discussing PSMS with others in the practice (2-page PDF; About PDFs).
Sustain the change.
Continue to offer training on skills and new tools to keep everyone educated and motivated to provide PSMS. Some practices designate a staff member to serve as the self-management support coach— the person who provides or coordinates ongoing training to keep the team from returning to the old, directive paradigm of care.
Over time, patient self-management support will become your practice's "usual care"— and your patients will benefit.
What You Will Need
- Decision-making authority
- Time for continued skills training
- Time to expand patient self-management support across the practice
Resources
Review these talking points before you discuss PSMS with others in the practice (2-page PDF; About PDFs).
Where to Go for Help
The Family Practice Management article, How Inclusive Leadership Can Help Your Practice Adapt to Change, discusses the importance of inclusive practice leadership in a time of practice redesign.
Support Patient Self-management
