Institute for Healthcare improvement Senior Director Cory Sevin co-authored a report that lays out a framework to guide practice facilitators - individuals trained to build the improvement skills of ambulatory care teams - in building improvement capacity to transform care delivery in ambulatory settings. The authors caution that unless practice facilitators understand their role, including “weaning” practices from their support, they’ll simply be adding a layer of staffing (i.e., expense) rather than imparting new skills and creating new capacity for change. The authors suggest practice facilitators to assist ambulatory care practices are showing promise as a beneficial delivery model to help primary care practices. The article describes a new diagnostic framework to assist practice facilitators in applying the most appropriate delivery mechanism for information needed to build a practice's capacity, with the goal of enabling practices to create and sustain improvement in their care delivery. The authors identify three factors that contribute to the complexity of the choices a practice facilitator must make when building the capacity for change in a practice setting:
- The unique way the journey of transformation unfolds within each practice;
- Dynamics inherent within the process of helping or facilitating change; and
- Tendencies of consultants and coaches to favor certain interventions regardless of suitability at any given time for building capacity.