How to measure the collective intelligence of primary healthcare teams?

Introduction: The capacity for teams and organizations to evolve and to thrive in ever-shifting environments is attributed to their collective intelligence. Collectively, intelligent team could prevent repetition of past mistakes and can help organizations and people work more efficiently. Researchers aimed to find a framework or a tool that could help explain collective intelligence in primary healthcare organizations.

Methods: The framework was developed iteratively following a three-step process based on the Pragmatic utility concept analysis, each step fetching data from both literature and the team's expertise: (i) finding an existing framework, (ii) developing an initial framework, (iii) testing and refining the framework.

Results: A broad literature search led researchers to focus more specifically on two interrelated frameworks, both concepts were created within the educational field. We first adapted these concepts to healthcare teams, then to the increasing interdisciplinarity of primary healthcare teams. We also subdivided the framework into clinical or organizational domain. Finally, we performed a secondary analysis from existing data of a larger project that aimed to evaluate seven primary care teams in Quebec.

Conclusions: This first attempt to conceptualize collective intelligence in a way that is specific to primary healthcare teams helps identify strengths and areas in which teams could potentially improve. From a theoretical perspective, the framework facilitates understanding of the concept of collective intelligence in primary healthcare teams. Our current results show a strong potential for this tool, but other tests and systematic validations are to be expected in order to better link collective intelligence and team performance.