The last few years have seen a number of communities emerge for healthcare professionals, and whilst these are perhaps more familiar to us when we think of social networks, a recent study highlights the value of more traditional social networks in terms of patient outcome.

The study found that the chances of survival for heart surgery patients increased when the teamwork levels of the staff that cared for them throughout the process was higher.

Why social networks matter

The research examined data from over 250,000 heart bypass patients alongside the interactions of the 466,000 doctors who were caring for them.

“Surgical care is complex, involving multiple providers dispersed across locations over time,” they say. “Our findings show that physician teamwork influences patient outcomes, even more than some measures of comorbid illness.”

The higher the level of teamwork among physicians, the better the chances that the patient would avoid ending up in the ER.  The analysis revealed that a 25% increase in teamwork would lead to 17 fewer readmissions out of every 1,000 patients treated.

As might be expected, levels of teamwork were extremely variable around the country, but the boost teamwork gave to the chances of patients persisted regardless of the number of operations performed at a hospital.

Perhaps understandably, teamwork was harder to achieve in larger facilities due to the high volume of patients, many of whom were referred by physicians that doctors had not worked with before.

“A lot of the focus in improving care is focused on the acute hospitalization for an episode of care. We believe that this focus is too myopic because it ignores the care delivered prior to the hospital stay and after discharge,” the authors say. “Efforts to improve teamwork, and outcomes, need to consider the entire care continuum.”

The authors now hope to expand their analysis to see if teamwork has a similar impact on other types of care.