The physicians at your group practice have been looking at models to help manage the exploding volume of non-visit work, including responding to in-basket messages, coordinating referrals, and managing prior authorizations. The physicians believe that bringing on a referral coordinator and a licensed vocational/practical nurse to manage these tasks would make their work more sustainable. You were nominated to share the idea with leadership and secure their support, but you have no idea where to start.

Team-based care has clear advantages for improving care quality, the patient experience, and the sustainability of practicing primary care. Family medicine physicians are often tasked with making a business case to their organization's senior leadership to justify additional personnel, a task that can feel daunting. Learning how to present the benefits of expanding team-based care in terms that resonate with leadership is essential for obtaining buy-in. This article presents five strategies to build a business case for investing in the care team.

1. UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE

Seeking to understand the perspectives and priorities of key leaders and stakeholders is an important first step. This can often be accomplished with an “inquisitive interview.” Before making a formal pitch to your leadership team, approach a supportive person in senior leadership for advice. Explain what you would like to do, and ask how they would approach it. In particular, try to understand the answers to these questions:

• What are the health system's pain points? Can the proposed team model help address those? For example, excessive patient wait times due to inadequate access is a common concern, so showing ways that team-based models expand visit capacity would be important. Poor ratings on patient experience surveys may be another area of concern, so showing how the model would improve patient communication or reduce cycle times or wait times could be beneficial.

• How does the proposed team model relate to things that are important to the organization? Consider system priorities reflected in the organization's mission statement, financial or regulatory pressures, or quality improvement initiatives. For example, if providing superior patient experience is a core principle of the organization, you would want to show how the team model can help with this.

• What would convince stakeholders that the proposed team model is feasible in the long term? What would they consider an adequate return on investment? For example, how much of an improvement in population health quality metrics or visit volumes would they consider significant enough to sustain the model? Understanding which specific metrics your leadership team would be looking at will help you present your business case more effectively.