Analysis of the Existence of Patient Care Team Using Social Network Methods in Physician Communities from Healthcare Insurance Companies

摘要

Care teams are formed by physicians of different specialties who take care of the same patient. Hence, if we find physicians that share patients with each other probably they configure an informal care team. Thus, the objective of this work is to explore the possibility of finding care teams using Social Network Analysis techniques in physician-physician networks where the physicians have patients in common. For this, we used healthcare insurance claims to build the network. There was the agreement on the metrics of degree and eigenvalue and of betweenness and closeness, also physicians with the 5 highest eigenvalues are highly interconnected. We discuss that the analysis of the physician-physician network with metrics of centrality is promising to reveal informal care teams. The high potential in calculating these metrics is verified from the results to evaluate member's performance and with that how to take actions to improve the work of the team.