Interdisciplinary Teams and Collaboration in Healthcare
This paper examines the role of interdisciplinary teams and collaboration in modern healthcare, with a particular focus on emergency department settings. It argues that the traditional culture of physician self-reliance creates gaps in clinical practice that teamwork can help close. Drawing on examples from emergency medicine and oncology, the paper discusses the importance of shared decision-making—especially regarding hospitalization—and highlights how hospitalists and physician assistants contribute to better outcomes. The paper also outlines practical strategies for fostering collaboration, including structured group interactions, interdisciplinary rounds, and team briefings, citing evidence that such approaches reduce hospital stays and costs while improving staff satisfaction.
- Introduction: The Case for Collaboration in Medicine: Self-reliance culture creates gaps interdisciplinary teams can close
- Collaboration in the Emergency Department: ER physicians and hospitalists need better joint coordination
- Interdisciplinary Decision-Making and Hospitalization: Shared expertise improves costly hospitalization decisions
- Real-World Examples of Effective Teamwork: Mark Twain St. Joseph's models collaborative emergency care
- Strategies to Enhance Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Structured interactions and rounds build team cohesion
- Conclusion: Collaboration is essential to high-quality emergency care
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What makes this paper effective
- Uses concrete, real-world examples—such as tumor boards and Mark Twain St. Joseph's Hospital—to ground abstract arguments about interdisciplinary collaboration in observable practice.
- Balances direct quotations from sources with original analysis, allowing the evidence to speak while maintaining a clear authorial argument throughout.
- Moves logically from diagnosing a problem (physician self-reliance culture) to identifying a solution (structured interdisciplinary teamwork) to providing evidence of outcomes (reduced length of stay, lower costs).
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of source integration: direct quotations are introduced with context, followed by the author's own interpretation and extension of the point. This prevents the essay from reading as a simple string of quotes and ensures the argument remains the author's own, supported—rather than replaced—by cited evidence.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a broad argument for interdisciplinary collaboration in medicine, then narrows its focus to the emergency department as a high-stakes test case. It examines specific clinical decisions (hospitalization), real-world implementation examples, and prescribed strategies for improving teamwork. The conclusion briefly synthesizes these threads. This funnel structure—broad claim → specific context → solutions → synthesis—is a reliable and effective pattern for argumentative health sciences writing.
Introduction: The Case for Collaboration in Medicine
Among those who know the field well, collaboration in medicine is generally considered to be the future of healthcare. It is important to acknowledge that significant gaps still exist in the ways clinical practice is applied today. This is why successful collaboration within interdisciplinary teams is so crucial and so fundamental to positive patient outcomes: it offers a means of closing those gaps and ensuring that care is as high-quality as possible.
"Healthcare has very disparate collaborative experiences. As individual providers, nurses, PAs, physicians, physician consultants, and pharmacists all work closely together to treat a hospitalized patient. However, on the other hand, physicians are trained to be independent in thought and care and do not think of themselves as depending on others. In residency, asking for help is often viewed as a weakness" (Campbell, 2013). This is often a result of a healthcare culture that prizes self-reliance over collaboration — one characterized by the attitude that "this is my decision, my patient, my practice, my call to make."
While strong leadership is important for quality patient outcomes, a team approach to care can often be the most effective model for delivering healthcare at its highest level. The importance of the team approach revolves around an interdisciplinary method to healthcare — one that places a strong emphasis on the different ranges of expertise that various professionals bring, and on their collective ability to deliver care to patients. An interdisciplinary approach is the way forward because it relies on the strengths of a range of professionals, allowing the weaknesses or knowledge gaps of one professional to be compensated for by the expertise of another.
Collaboration in the Emergency Department
In many hospitals, shared interests and joint responsibilities in the emergency room are critical, yet in reality there is often far too little collaboration between ER physicians and hospitalists — beyond brief encounters discussing specific patients (Pollack, 2012). As Pollack notes, "These specialists do not routinely work together globally, missing opportunities to examine evidence, develop protocols for hospital admission, design referral programs for outpatient services that may allow avoidance of admission, conduct quality reviews of co-managed patients, and assess ways to enhance communication on throughput, patient handoffs, medication reconciliation, and feedback regarding a patient's subsequent course" (2012).
As a result of the growing importance of shared patient care among emergency physicians and hospitalists, there is a long-overdue need to improve interdisciplinary teamwork in these two areas (Pollack, 2012). One analogy that illustrates this necessity is the tumor board model, in which medical oncologists, surgical oncologists, pathologists, and radiation oncologists gather to assess the best course of treatment for patients who benefit from co-management and shared decision-making. Cancer units within hospitals frequently serve as shining examples of the benefits of interdisciplinary teamwork, depending on a mix of skills and specialties in order to aggressively fight the spread of cancer.
Interdisciplinary Decision-Making and Hospitalization
One area within the emergency department that urgently needs improvement is decision-making across departments. When all members are able to contribute their expertise toward a shared verdict on patient care, the quality of decisions improves significantly. One of the most consequential decisions made in the emergency department is whether or not to hospitalize a patient — and this is a decision that must be made in an interdisciplinary fashion.
The question of whether to hospitalize is also one of the most expensive decisions made in the context of emergency care. It must be critically evaluated to reduce unnecessary costs. Hospitalists are fundamental to achieving this goal and to identifying alternatives to admission (Pollack, 2012). As Pollack explains, "Hospitalists are often knowledgeable about outpatient care strategies not typically utilized by emergency physicians, such as peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) lines, outpatient parenteral antibiotic therapy, and transfers to skilled nursing facilities and hospice settings. Interdisciplinary expertise on the management of patients in clinical decision units allows a short-term ED care plan to help further determine need for hospital care. Avoidance of unnecessary admissions will be increasingly important as the CMS and other payers continue to focus on both 1-day admissions and 'inappropriate' admissions" (2012).
Conclusion
The emergency room is the department where the high stakes of life or death are constantly in play. This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on all team members, which means that everyone must work at the highest level of their abilities. Achieving the highest standard of patient care is precisely the reason collaboration is a necessity in the emergency department. Interdisciplinary teams depend on effective collaboration to allow experts to showcase their strengths and to rely on one another as a strategic, interlocking team working toward the shared goal of superior patient outcomes.
References
Campbell, K. (2013). Collaboration in medicine: Working together to improve care and land disabled aircraft. Retrieved from whvheart.com.
Curley, C., McEachern, J. E., & Speroff, T. (1998). A firm trial of interdisciplinary rounds on the inpatient medical wards: An intervention designed using continuous quality improvement. Evidence-Based Nursing, 40–54.
Mazzaferro, A. (2011, November 28). Collaboration and compassion are keys to emergency care. Retrieved from calaverasenterprise.com.
O'Daniel, M. R., & Rosenstein, A. H. (2013). Professional communication and team collaboration. Retrieved from ahrq.gov.
Pollack, C. (2012). Emergency medicine and hospital medicine. The Journal of Emergency Medicine, 328–334.
Ward, J. (2012, November 16). The importance of communication between nurses and interdisciplinary team members. Retrieved from nursetogether.com.
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