Training health care professionals to work together in managing the problems of elderly patients is an area where the home health care industry can make a crucialand substantial contribution. Since 1996, Rush Home Care Network, an affiliate agency of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, has served as a clinical training site for an interdisciplinary education program. This program, the Rush Geriatric Interdisciplinary Team Training Program, was initially funded in 1996 through a grant from the John A. Hartford Foundation. Trainees from medicine, nursing, socialwork, pharmacy, occupationaltherapy, physicaltherapy, and clinical nutrition observe and work with Rush home care teams. They participate in team meetings, home visits, patient assessment and counseling, and in-service training. The Rush home care experience in interdisciplinary team training can be viewed as a modelfor other home health care organizations interested in becoming clinical training sites for team care.
The use of teams in health care has generally relied on the notion that teams must physically meet and function in person in the same location, on a regular, scheduled basis, in order to maximize the value of the interdisciplinary process. This article examines the concept of creating a different kind of team in primary care, out-patient settings--one which relies upon communications technology to link together clinicians from different locations to coordinate and manage the care of patients, particularly those with chronic disease. This approach--referred to as Virtual Integrated Practice--is designed to overcome the barriers of traditional in-person teams by creating a "virtual team" with the potential to function more efficiently, productively, and satisfactorily for clinicians and patients alike.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.