Teamwork in Health Care: Maximizing Collective Intelligence via Inclusive Collaboration and Open Communication

Abstract

Teams offer the potential to achieve more than any person could achieve working alone; yet, particularly in teams that span professional boundaries, it is critical to capitalize on the variety of knowledge, skills, and abilities available. This article reviews research from the field of organizational behavior to shed light on what makes for a collectively intelligent team. In doing so, we highlight the importance of moving beyond simply including smart people on a team to thinking about how those people can effectively coordinate and collaborate. In particular, we review the importance of two communication processes: ensuring that team members with relevant knowledge (1) speak up when one's expertise can be helpful and (2) influence the team's work so that the team does its collective best for the patient. The Promise and Challenge of Team-Based Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration in Health CareAcross health care, there is an increasing reliance on teams from a variety of specialties (e.g., nursing, physician specialties, physical therapy, social work) to care for patients. At the same time, medical error is estimated to be "the third most common cause of death in the US" [1], and teamwork failures (e.g., failures in communication) account for up to 70-80 percent of serious medical errors [2][3][4][5]. The shift to providing care in teams is well founded given the potential for improved performance that comes with teamwork [6], but, as demonstrated by these grave statistics, teamwork does not come without challenges. Consequently, there is a critical need for health care professionals, particularly those in leadership roles, to consider strategies for improving team-based approaches to providing quality patient care.Teams offer the promise to improve clinical care because they can aggregate, modify, combine, and apply a greater amount and variety of knowledge in order to make decisions, solve problems, generate ideas, and execute tasks more effectively and efficiently than any individual working alone [6]. Given this potential, a multidisciplinary team of health care professionals could ideally work together to determine diagnoses,

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