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This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Interdisciplinary Health Team Care Conference, which took place September 10-12, 1987 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  It is reproduced here with the permission of the author.

As society has become increasingly complex, interdisciplinary teams have become a necessary and established element in the delivery of health care. Radical changes in medical knowledge, technology, and reimbursement and payment systems have created the need for effective interdisciplinary health care team performance. An understanding of what constitutes an effective health care team appears not to be very clear. Evaluation efforts to determine interdisciplinary health care effectiveness have been scarce because the task itself is a difficult one. Problems in evaluating team effectiveness have resulted from the inability of health professionals to agree upon a definition of an interdisciplinary health care team, problems associated with clarifying measures of effectiveness, and the difficulty involved in using research methodologies to study a concept that is under constant change (Temkin-Greener, 1983). Last year at the Eighth Annual Conference on Interdisciplinary Health Team Care, Heineman and Tsukuda (1987) presented an excellent overview of the problems and considerations involved in the evaluation of health care teams. This paper is intended to add to this discussion by suggesting a conceptual model of evaluation using a qualitative design.