Team creativity can and should play a key role in primary care

August 13, 2025 — Team creativity can be measured in primary care, according to a new study at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Primary care teams are essential to high-quality, patient-centered care yet face persistent challenges despite growing recognition of their operational expertise. Their role as a source of creative ideas for improving care is underleveraged while empirical tools for assessing and supporting creativity in primary care teams also remained scarce. The findings are published in Health Care Management Review.

“In other industries, team creativity is well-studied and is gaining traction in health care, where it may foster innovation and improvement,” said Yuna Lee, PhD, assistant professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and first author.

“Our goal was to adapt and refine the concept of team creativity for primary care.” 

Over the past two decades, primary care in the United States has undergone a wave of innovation in response to persistent challenges, including new models of financing, delivery, and workforce design. At the forefront of these efforts are primary care teams—comprising physicians, nurses, medical assistants, and other staff—who work together to solve problems and adapt care on a daily basis.

The researchers used a three-stage empirical design. First, team creativity dimensions were identified through a review and thematic analysis of management literature. The second stage of the study involved consulting an expert panel of 15 scholars and professionals with experience in primary care who adapted these dimensions for primary care. Third, a survey of 648 primary care team members in a large health system was followed by an analysis to identify core dimensions.

Five dimensions of primary care team creativity emerged:

• Team orientation to creativity
• Team creative processes
• Job-required creativity
• Team creative outputs
• Leveraging team creativity

“Primary care teams can apply these five dimensions to generate creative ideas in their daily work,” said Lee. “Managers can support this by allocating resources, implementing supportive practices, and recognizing their creative contributions.”

With primary care teams increasingly operating in complex environments shaped by burnout, staffing shortages, care coordination challenges, and complex patient needs, this work offers a foundation for making creativity a core capability in high-performing primary care teams, Lee observed.

“Despite many innovations in primary care, the creative capacity of frontline teams remains underexplored,” Lee points out. “The findings from our study suggest that with supportive dynamics and infrastructure, these teams can generate solutions to persistent challenges—contributing to care quality and operational efficiency.”

Co-authors are Nancy LaVine, Northwell Health and Department of Medicine, Lenox Hill Hospital; Yulia Kogan, Population Health Analytics, Northwell Health; and Lusine Poghosyan, Columbia University School of Nursing and Department of Health Policy and Management, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

The study was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, grant 5R03HS027502-02.

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

Founded in 1922, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Columbia Mailman School is the third largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its nearly 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change and health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with more than 1,300 graduate students from 55 nations pursuing a variety of master’s and doctoral degree programs. The Columbia Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers, including ICAP and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit www.mailman.columbia.edu.