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There is currently a resurgence of interest in interprofessional education and collaborative practice (IPECP) and its potential to positively impact health outcomes at both the patient level and population level, healthcare delivery, and health professions education. This resurgence of interest led to the creation of the National Center on Interprofessional Collaborative Practice and Education in October 2012. 

OBJECTIVES: Intragroup conflicts often occur when people are called upon to collaborate in the accomplishment of a task. For example, when surgeons and nurses work together during an operation, conflicts may emerge because of differences in functional understanding. Whether these conflicts are beneficial or detrimental to team outcomes has been the source of much debate. From one perspective, a conflict that stems from differences in members' functional understanding may enhance team members' understanding and performance of the task at hand.

According to the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC), overall enrollment in US medical schools rose in the decade ending in 2012 by nearly 28% (from 80,180 to 102,498), with 4 new allopathicand 3 new osteopathic medical schools opening in 2013 alone. The number of residency positions also rose by 17.5% in the last decade, despite the cap on Medicare funding in 1996. In addition, there appear to be ample residency positions available to accommodate the expansion, despite claims to the contrary.

There is growing consensus that the health care workforce in the United States needs to be reconfigured to meet the needs of a health care system that is being rapidly and permanently redesigned. Accountable care organizations and patient-centered medical homes, for instance, will greatly alter the mix of caregivers needed and create new roles for existing health care workers. The focus of health system innovation, however, has largely been on reorganizing care delivery processes, reengineering workflows, and adopting electronic technology to improve outcomes.

The Affordable Care Act created the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (Innovation Center) to test innovative payment and service delivery models to reduce program expenditures under Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and to enhance the quality of care that Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) beneficiaries receive. CMS is testing more than 20 models under this authority that create new incentives for clinicians and organizations that deliver medical care through CMS programs to deliver better care at lower cost.

The adult primary care “physician shortage” is more accurately portrayed as a gap between the adult population’s demand for primary care services and the capacity of primary care, as currently delivered, to meet that demand. Given current trends, producing more adult primary care clinicians will not close the demand-capacity gap.

The science of team training in healthcare has progressed dramatically in recent years. Methodologies have been refined and adapted for the unique and varied needs within healthcare, where once team training approaches were borrowed from other industries with little modification. Evidence continues to emerge and bolster the case that team training is an effective strategy for improving patient safety. Research is also elucidating the conditions under which teamwork training is most likely to have an impact, and what determines whether improvements achieved will be maintained over time.

Throughout this century there have been many efforts to reform the medical curriculum. These efforts have largely been unsuccessful in producing fundamental changes in the training of medical students. The author challenges the traditional notion that changes to medical education are most appropriately made at the level of the curriculum, or the formal educational programs and instruction provided to students.

Team-based interprofessional practice plays a central role in new models of care delivery. However, training health professionals for interprofessional practice remains a challenge. Centers for Interprofessional Education (IPE) exist at many academic institutions but have had limited success. The authors conducted telephone interviews with 12 leaders of academic centers for IPE, identified through a key informant method. Qualitative analysis of interview notes for common themes of barriers, successes, and insights.

Purpose: This article examines literature on interdisciplinary education and teamwork in health care, to discover the major issues and best practices.

Methods: A literature review of mainly North American articles using search terms such as interdisciplinary, interprofessional, multidisciplinary with medical education.