About MCT
Mission
Our mission is to build, support, and lead great care teams that maximize quality care, service excellence, and team satisfaction.
- MCT is the medical practice of choice for clinicians who want to work on teams that provide great care in an efficient and rewarding practice AND is bringing the JOY back to medicine.
- MCT is the partner of choice for hospitals looking for a team to deliver excellence, stability, and collaboration.
Most organizations list their core values and offer no explanation of how they fit into their actions or how they become part of the fabric of their culture. Here’s a little more depth to what MCT values.
There are certain values that have inherent validity and are foundational to MCT:
- Integrity and honesty – without these, you can’t have trust, which underpins teamwork. And you can’t have effective communication.
- Open yet respectful communication – great organizations over-communicate, and they do so in all directions, not just top down. Everyone has a voice.
- Caring and compassion – clearly vital to providing great care to patients, it’s also important for us to treat our MCT and hospital colleagues the same way.
- Continual improvement and innovation – we can always do better tomorrow than we did today. We learn from our mistakes. The best ideas come from people at the front lines.
MCT is all about teamwork. With some modifications to Patrick Lencioni’s work in Five Dysfunctions of a Team, these are some of the values that are critical to good teamwork:
- Trust – team members need to know that other members of the team have both the skill and character to entrust them to perform their parts of the patient’s care. Without this, there will be unproductive redundancy and second-guessing.
- Open dialogue (see communication above) including conflict around ideas – brings the team to better performance and higher quality.
- Commitment to the team and its plans – the group will get together and make decisions and create protocols, standards, and processes. But everyone on the team needs to commit to the final decision so not to undermine the plan or the group’s trust.
- Accountability – this means holding ourselves and other team members accountable to the plan and the group. There must be an environment where you can tell fellow team members and leaders that they are not performing or holding up the standard.
- Data and results driven – best to hold people accountable with objective data. It’s good to make sure we’re doing things the right way (process metrics) but much better if we’re also getting great results (outcome metrics).
- Support and Forgiveness – everyone will have a bad day from time to time. In those moments, we need to be able to rely on our teammates to prop us up and get us through. Likewise, we will all fall short, miss the deadline, forget something from time to time. If we can’t forgive each other, it will “eat the team up inside” (a nod to Don Henley).
MCT is made up of individuals. And everyone has their own core values that drive them. But what Daniel Pink said in Drive (detailed below) has always resonated. MCT supports our members in these values:
- Autonomy – medicine is practiced by highly trained and intelligent clinicians who are individually licensed and committed to their patients. We support the autonomy that must go hand in hand with that commitment. (see next section on balance)
- Mastery – MCT attracts and recognizes clinicians who are constantly looking to improve their craft.
- Purpose – we are fortunate that every day we go to work we are providing nothing short of great and meaningful service to people in their hours of need.
Some other values seem to be at odds with each other. These seeming paradoxes are frequently present in great organizations (see Extreme Toyota for an explanation of how its “radical contradictions” lead to great performance). Under closer inspection, if balanced correctly, the dynamic tension between these pairs of forces establish a stable and self-correcting system.
- Confidence and Humility – you can’t work in medicine unless you have a healthy dose of confidence in your skills and your team. But this needs to be balanced with the humility that comes from knowing that what we know today could be proven wrong tomorrow and that we are all one accident or illness away from being on the other end of the stethoscope.
- Hard Work and Fun – working in the ED or on the HM service is almost always hard. Twelve hours can fly by with barely a break for a snack. And the work is serious – sometimes gut-wrenching. But at the right times and in the right way, infusing work with humor and fun is a natural balm for the stress and burnout that can accompany these practices. And it’s something we do for each other.
- Efficiency and Quality – many people see these as a zero-sum game. The faster you move patients the lower the quality. But especially in EM, a specialty where minutes count, caring for patients efficiently is essential to quality. And in HM, added time in the hospital increases risk for infection, falls and more. Systems need to be created that remove wasted effort and maximize time for patient engagement and critical thinking.
- Autonomy and Standardization – as stated above, an individually licensed clinician has the ultimate control over his or her practice. And people are more satisfied in their work if they have autonomy. But autonomy doesn’t mean that you need to make every decision for every patient every day. Standardization through protocols, pathways, order sets and more liberates the clinician from the tedium that distracts us, requires more communication, exposes us to risk and reduces quality. This maximizes autonomy where it counts. Further, local group autonomy, in addition to personal autonomy, is vital in selecting, modifying, or creating these standards and processes.
Learn more about how we exemplify these concepts in our practice.
Our Team
Mission Care Teams was founded in 2018 by Dr. Ray Iannaccone as an alternative to the traditional emergency medicine or hospital medicine group. His varied experiences in EM and other hospital-based specialties led him to believe that the current approaches have beaten down our clinicians, frustrated our patients and mired hospitals in poor performance and mediocre results.
About Ray
Ray Iannaccone, MD, FACEP, FACHE, has more than 30 years of experience in emergency medicine and other hospital-based physician practices. In that time, he’s led clinicians in a variety of settings, from the U.S. Navy to independent hospitals to a Fortune 500 company, where he served as the President to more than 15,000 clinicians at 1,000 sites nationwide.
“I’ve been around the medical world, and I think that the optimal place for clinicians to work doesn’t exist yet,” Ray says… “Whether in the military, in academic research, with a democratic group, a national public company, or a private-equity backed EM/HM group, I’ve seen the positive and negative aspects of all of these practice types. I want to capitalize on this broad experience to develop a practice that combines the best of all worlds with innovative solutions.”
During his tenure as President and CEO of a partnership (Emergency Medical Associates), Ray led a team that grew a small, close-knit group into a top-notch regional practice. The group enjoyed high clinician and client satisfaction—and low clinician and client turnover. During its halcyon years, the group had “it”—that indescribable thing that drives engagement and satisfaction. The company drew national attention for its ability to attract, retain, and engage the highest caliber clinicians in the country. The group elected to sell the company in 2015 in the face of mounting concerns over consolidation among payers, hospitals, and competitors.
They joined a company with great people who were eager to spread EMA’s “secret sauce” to the larger group. However, the task of scaling exponentially to a national, publicly-traded company proved too great. And, while the clinicians who made the transition continued to provide great care in great departments, many said that “it” was gone. “The familiarity and connectedness that we had enjoyed as a partnership vanished,” explains Ray wistfully. “Clinicians still went to work in the same hospitals, in the same departments, but something was palpably different.”
Now, Ray is building the dream team from the ground up. He and his new management team are fundamentally changing the way that care is provided by shifting from individual clinicians caring for patients to teams of dedicated providers working in sync.
“We’re focused on creating the best team of clinicians for our hospitals. Not a thousand hospitals, not a hundred hospitals—just a few hospitals,” Ray explains. “Although it seems counterintuitive, our goal is not to have 100 clients; that’s not our sweet spot. Our goal is to have about a dozen sites that are humming, vibrant, and firing on all cylinders to the benefit of patients, clinicians, and hospital management.”
Imagine teams of like-minded clinicians, sharing the same dream of great care to grateful patients.
Learn more about how we’re making this dream a reality.
Our History
Mission Care Teams was borne of frustration in 2018. It was then that Dr. Ray Iannaccone, a transformative healthcare leader and emergency physician, embarked on the quest to build a better way to deliver care.
Emergency departments and hospital medicine services are, overall, inefficient, busy, and noisy places that tax the people who work there, frustrate the patients who seek care and challenge the resources of the hospital. As a part of the hospital that deals with unscheduled, and sometimes unpredictable, demand, this is an inevitable part of the hospital reality.
But much of this unpredictability can be minimized. Much of the drain on staff can be mitigated. And much of the resource consumption can be streamlined.
True innovation happens when passion meets purpose. Imagine:
- Clinicians who are energized, appreciated, engaged, and driven.
- Hospitals delivering the caliber of care their patients need—and deserve.
- Standardized processes that maximize efficiency and guarantee quality.
- Responsive staffing that can maximize efficiency and reduce waste.
With this in mind, Dr. Iannaccone developed a model of care that was predicated on care teams and not on individuals. Getting all members to work “at the top of their licenses,” helps with cost and burnout. In addition, it allows for a more consistent and higher quality practice. And lastly, with more “team members” in the department, it allows for more attention on patient experience, guideline adherence/ performance metrics and risk reduction.
Patients deserve Care Teams.
Clinicians deserve to enJOY their work.
Hospitals deserve great departments.
Learn more about how we’re doing it.
Our Culture
Mission Care Teams was created for clinicians by clinicians. By focusing on designing the ideal medical group for our specialties, we’ve created a culture that innately values clinicians, respects the privilege of providing care to people in need, and supports the processes that make fulfilling our mission possible.
- People Power: Bi-directional and cascading communication; engagement programs; comprehensive onboarding; mentorship and professional development; impactful department meetings; reward and recognition.
- Strong Leadership: Regular reporting; timely feedback; leadership development; servant leadership.
- Clinical Tools: Peer review; quality improvement; clinical documentation integrity; direct observation; guidelines, protocols, and pathways.
- Infrastructure: Data analytics; process improvement; project management; change management; technology.
We’ve developed a team approach to medicine that partners physicians with highly trained advanced practice clinicians and responsive medical scribes. This configuration truly supports joyful work, reduces administrative burden, and boosts performance.
Contact us to learn more about our culture.