Three Key Elements of Southcentral Foundation’s Integrated Care Teams
Southcentral Foundation has been providing primary care through Integrated Care Teams for over two decades. These teams are more than a staffing model for healthcare organizations, they are an organizational redesign that supports the delivery of high-quality relationship-based care. In this blog, we’ll explore three key elements that make SCF’s Integrated Care Teams unique.
Relationships are the operating system. SCF’s Nuka System of Care prioritizes relationships between healthcare providers and customer-owners, as well as between the care team members. Many organizations focus first on structure, staffing, or workflows, but SCF’s implementation approach (the READI model) emphasizes community input, stakeholder engagement, team relationships, and organizational buy-in as pre-requisites for sustainable change. One way SCF supports its relationship-based approach is through training courses such as Core Concepts. SCF teaches care team members (as well as all other employees) communication tools to support building and maintaining relationships with customer-owners and each other.
There is team-based accountability. Traditional primary care is often organized around the physician and some team-based approaches have gone from physician-alone to a physician-led model. SCF redesigned care around a multidisciplinary team that works together in relationship to support customer-owners. This requires redesigning team composition, addressing workload distribution, responsibilities, access, and supporting care team members in working at the top of their license, meaning that any tasks that fall within the scope of a team member’s license are performed by that team member whenever possible. The goal isn’t to preserve provider capacity, but rather to ensure that the responsibility for customer-owner support extends beyond any single provider. To support healthcare as a shared responsibility, teams are responsible for tracking customer-owner data (such as screenings, vaccinations, etc.), and SCF makes aggregate data (without PHI) available to the entire organization so that teams can learn from SCF’s highest-performing teams.
Customer-owners drive the system. More than just using feedback to drive targeted improvements, SCF’s approach puts customer-owners in the driver’s seat. For example, early in system redesign, customer-owners said they wanted more support for behavioral health, so SCF prioritized the integration of Behavioral Health Consultants into primary care clinics. In another system, feedback may prioritize access to other disciplines or customers may want to see their physician every time, which would look different than SCF’s approach in which customer-owners work with their entire care team rather than just their provider.
SCF’s Integrated Care Teams have been a critical part of how SCF has achieved improved health outcomes for customer-owners, as well as high customer and employee satisfaction rates. If you would like to learn more about how SCF’s Integrated Care Teams work, SCF is offering a virtual Integrated Care Team training from September 15-16, 2026. For more information on this training, or any other aspect of SCF’s Nuka System of Care, feel free to contact the SCF Learning Institute.
