Measuring Primary Care Productivity in the Era of Interprofessional Team Care: Stakeholder, Scoping Review, and Implementation Perspectives

Context: Current primary care productivity measures do not account for investment in interprofessional primary care teams in relation to primary care goals and thus are insufficient for assessing and improving primary care efficiency and productivity. We explored alternative productivity measurement methods.

Methods: We conducted a scoping review of English language literature between 2008 and 2023 to identify articles that assessed primary care practice productivity and efficiency. We reviewed the full texts of articles to assess their analytic models including inputs, outputs, and context measures. Using scoping review results to inform content, we conducted a modified Delphi expert panel to discuss potential use cases, analytic approaches, and data elements for new primary care productivity measures. Panelists anonymously voted on recommendations for guiding near-term measure development and testing.

Findings: Evidence review identified 25 included studies. The majority (76%, 19/25) used an economic model-based productivity calculation, predominantly estimated using data envelopment analysis (DEA), with stochastic frontier analysis accounting for most of the remainder. Primary care staffing was the most common input, included in 84% of the 19 economic model studies. As outputs, over half (53%) of studies included measures of quality of care, whereas the same proportion included numbers of clinical activities. No studies used patient-reported experiences of care. Expert panelists recommended that initial measure development focus on primary care practice efficiency improvement, building the measure on routinely collected health system data, accounting for the clinical team’s full-time equivalent staffing, and incorporating quality of care. Panelists endorsed DEA while also acknowledging that other approaches had potential.

Conclusions: We identified measurement approaches that aligned with both economic and foundational primary care principles but none that were implemented for routine use. Opportunities exist to develop metrics that accurately reflect primary care structures, goals, and values.