Marc R. Matthews, M.D.

Location

Contact

SUMMARY

The research involvement and interests of Marc R. Matthews, M.D., include improving health care delivery systems and the patient experience of health care. Dr. Matthews also focuses on improving the quality of management strategies for chronic disease such as hypertension, asthma and diabetes mellitus.

Focus areas

• Health care delivery. Dr. Matthews and his colleagues across a wide variety of disciplines have investigated how health care team composition and performance affect the quality and total cost of health care delivery. This work focuses on how to support teams with training, systems and workflows, and physical design of team spaces.
• Team-based care. Dr. Matthews and colleagues work to understand the factors that improve team performance and satisfaction. To date, this work has evaluated the performance of hundreds of health care teams across multiple geographic and practice areas, identifying the factors that can help teams to be more high functioning.
• Chronic disease management. Dr. Matthews and his team have implemented several quality-improvement projects to improve the number of patients receiving optimal care for chronic disease such as diabetes and hypertension. These initiatives have improved the number of patients receiving optimal evidence-based care, decreased total cost of care and improved patient satisfaction.

Significance to patient care

Better understanding patient needs and expectations and how to meet those needs with optimally delivered health care from a high-performing team is the best way to ensure that patients living with chronic disease get the optimal care they need to maintain their health and live long and happy lives. This work has the potential to reverse trends in fragmentation and increased cost of health care. Optimizing primary care teams and their support structures is the best way to ensure the development and sustainability of a strong primary care system.