In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, medical practices face unprecedented challenges in delivering high-quality care while managing operational efficiency. Practice Facilitation has emerged as a crucial solution, offering healthcare organizations the support and expertise needed to thrive in this complex environment. As we navigate through 2025, the benefits of practice facilitation have become increasingly evident across the healthcare sector.
Technical Assistance with a Twist
Practice facilitation, a form of technical assistance, is an essential tool for improving healthcare delivery by offering hands-on support for healthcare teams as they implement and sustain evidence-based protocols. A solution-focused, expert-driven model; its proactive, structured process provides guidance, mentorship, and resources for medical practices, helping them thrive in a rapidly evolving healthcare landscape.
Working directly with healthcare teams, practice facilitators identify specific challenges within a healthcare organization and designs personalized solutions with the goal of improving patient outcomes. This approach ensures that improvements are relevant to the practice’s unique needs – whether it’s optimizing workflows, enhancing patient care, or addressing operational inefficiencies.
Facilitators act as mentors and partners, helping teams become more self-sufficient and resilient. The goal is not to tell healthcare teams what to do, but to provide them with the tools, knowledge, and confidence to help healthcare practices achieve meaningful, systemic changes to patient outcomes.
What Practice Facilitation Can Do
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Practice Facilitation can assist facilities with implementing clinically-backed best practices, providing resources and strategies, optimizing their EHR, and making effective use of data; while helping lessen the impact of challenges and identifying community resources.
Streamlining processes and improving operational efficiencies can reduce waste and lower costs. Practice Facilitation can help healthcare providers become more efficient, which can ultimately lead to significant savings while maintaining or improving quality of care.
The recommendations that practice facilitators make may not be groundbreaking, but sometimes a fresh set of eyes and a few process tweaks are all that might be needed to achieve widespread system change and improve patient outcomes.
Successful Practice Facilitation
Recently, Telligen practice facilitators worked with a large primary care practice in the Midwest to improve their diabetes care management processes. The practice had suboptimal A1C testing rates (only 65% of diabetic patients had regular testing). In addition, inconsistent follow-up procedures for patients with elevated A1C levels hindered patient outcomes and it was identified that there was no standardized workflow for diabetes care management.
The Telligen facilitator conducted an initial practice assessment and, from the results of this assessment, helped the practice establish a quality improvement team to assist with data collection and analysis, as well as guide the development of new workflows.
They were also instrumental in assisting the practice to create a diabetes registry, implement standing orders for A1C testing, develop a recall system for overdue patients, and establish regular team huddles to discuss high-risk patients.
These immediate fixes, with the goal of creating sustainable change, produced impressive results.
In just six months, A1C testing rates increased to 85%; documentation and follow-up procedures were improved; team communication was better; and the practice achieved a more structured approach to diabetes care management.
In a rural primary care clinic, Telligen practice facilitators helped to improve their chronic care management and telehealth integration. In that practice, the initial challenges included low patient engagement in chronic care management, underutilized telehealth capabilities, staff burnout from inefficient workflows, and poor care coordination for complex patients.
Facilitators conducted baseline assessments, helped establish a quality improvement team, and provided weekly coaching sessions that supported the implementation of new processes.
By encouraging the implementation of structured care management protocols and the development of a hybrid care model combining in-person and virtual visits, which included creating standardized workflows for chronic care follow up and establishing regular team care planning meetings, the practice realized a 40% increase in chronic care management enrollment, 60% increase in telehealth utilization and a 30% improvement in patient satisfaction scores. All of this was accomplished while realizing increased staff efficiency, and improved care coordination metrics.
Population-Level Results with a Patient Focus
While the challenges of achieving population-level health outcomes remain significant for individual healthcare practices, success requires a strategic combination of technology adoption, community partnerships, and systemic changes to care delivery models. Practice facilitation can serve as a crucial bridge, helping smaller practices implement sustainable solutions while maintaining their independence.
By embracing these changes, individual practices can contribute meaningfully to population health improvements, even within their resource constraints. The key lies in finding the right balance between maintaining personalized patient care and implementing broader population health initiatives that create lasting impact across communities.