A new Virginia law governing collaborations between nurse practitioners and doctors leaves unresolved key legal issues in team-based care, including those pertaining to medical malpractice and liability and anticompetitive practices.

Many team members such as nurses and medical assistants have key roles in meeting practice goals but receive little if any performance-based compensation. In part, nursing union rules create a barrier by inhibiting trials of productivity-based pay or shared-risk models.

Implementing nonhierarchical interprofessional teams in medical care will be more effective if incoming health professionals are trained to work in such groups.

Is this a conflict over a team member’s practice style or is it a breach professional boundaries? Is it appropriate for team members to make this judgment, or should it instead come from the team leader?

Distinctions in garb worn by health care professionals have their drawbacks, to the degree that reinforcing the differences between team members can reinforce rigid role divisions and hierarchical inequities that undermine teamwork.

Accountable care organizations helmed by hospitals could look very different than those helmed by doctors.

Responsibility for patient care is shifting from individual physicians to groups comprising different specialists who, together, are accountable for “episodes” of care.

To succeed, medical teams must work to develop team cognition and coordination, a cooperative spirit, and active fostering of teamwork.

Women do not have an exclusive claim to traits that make for effective leadership in the contemporary context.

The AMA Code of Medical Ethics’ opinion on physician administrators.