To meet the ever-increasing demands of primary healthcare, nurse practitioners have put into practice various models of care. Doctor co-management of patients can be one such models, this model proposes management of patients by more than clinical nurses providing primary care services. This approach can be investigated in primary care, with both outpatient primary care serving team consisting of care specialists and physicians, and with surgical teams. Due to the increased nurse-patient management in primary care, this work proposes physician co-management as a nurse practitioner model for care delivery in primary care settings.
Physician co-management is defined as a situation in which two primary care professionals offering care management services to one particular patient (Norful et al., 2018). Practitioners can be both nurse practitioners and physicians, jointly providing health care management to one patient. Health care management tasks offered by these professionals may include but not limited, acute and chronic illness management, pharmacological management, patient education, and patient follow-ups (Norful et al., 2019). Physician co-management can also be applied in performing administrative workload, whereby the co-managers share the workload through coordinated workflow, responding to the patient, and even sharing the paperwork related to health management.
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Physician co-management can be systematically applied in day-to-day care delivery in consideration to the three related attributes; clinical alignment, effective communication, and mutual trust and respect between the co-care givers involved in care management. First, enhanced communication is vital in implementing co-management for developing an effective care plan, understanding care goals, and defining the roles of each practitioner’s role in care management. In addition to effective communication, co-management implementation should take into account mutual respect and trust among nurse practitioner and the physician and clinical care alignment.
The nurse-practitioner and physician co-management model is an equally effective theoretical approach, through which primary care stress can be reduced. It allows shared workload; hence, it is possible to serve the increasing patients volume in healthcare settings. This approach is effective since it can allow primary care physicians to be able to make other side appointments while providing health care services to their patients.
References
Norful, A. A., de Jacq, K., Carlino, R., & Poghosyan, L. (2018). Nurse Practitioner–Physician Comanagement: A Theoretical Model to Alleviate Primary Care Strain. The Annals of Family Medicine , 16 (3), 250–256. https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.2230
Norful, A. A., Swords, K., Marichal, M., Cho, H., & Poghosyan, L. (2019). Nurse practitioner–physician comanagement of primary care patients. Health Care Management Review , 44 (3), 235–245. https://doi.org/10.1097/HMR.0000000000000161
