Using IT to improve clinical teamwork and communication.

Effective communication among care team members is not easy to accomplish. Although all clinical disciplines rely upon each other while providing care to patients, the specific care processes, customary interactions, and professional hierarchy usually in place do not facilitate a team approach to care. Much of this originates with professional training. Professionals in different disciplines train in separate environments with little opportunity to develop a foundation for smoothly working with professionals from other disciplines. The traditional curricula for these disciplines typically does not include critical team and communication skills. In addition, traditional paper-based processes only reinforce the communication silos between members of the multidisciplinary care team. Members of each discipline document their patient findings in separate sections of the chart when they have the time to enter them, which is often at the end of the shift or — at best — an hour or two after the fact. This makes it difficult for an individual clinician to locate and synthesize critical patient data. Often the clinician needs to review information from prior patient visits, which presents even more challenges. Much physician and nurse time is devoted to searching for patient data and communicating the findings, a terrible use of professional time. Clinical team members constantly struggle to use the latest patient data when making care decisions. This inefficiency in the workflow presents inherent opportunities for errors and missteps.