Few industries match the scale of health care. In the United States alone, an estimated 85% of the population has at least 1 health care encounter annually and at least one quarter of these people ...experience 4 to 9 encounters annually. A single visit requires collaboration among a multidisciplinary group of clinicians, administrative staff, patients, and their loved ones. Multiple visits often occur across different clinicians working in different organizations. Ineffective care coordination and the underlying suboptimal teamwork processes are a public health issue. Health care delivery systems exemplify complex organizations operating under high stakes in dynamic policy and regulatory environments. The coordination and delivery of safe, high-quality care demands reliable teamwork and collaboration within, as well as across, organizational, disciplinary, technical, and cultural boundaries. In this review, we synthesize the evidence examining teams and teamwork in health care delivery settings in order to characterize the current state of the science and to highlight gaps in which studies can further illuminate our evidence-based understanding of teamwork and collaboration. Specifically, we highlight evidence concerning (a) the relationship between teamwork and multilevel outcomes, (b) effective teamwork behaviors, (c) competencies (i.e., knowledge, skills, and attitudes) underlying effective teamwork in the health professions, (d) teamwork interventions, (e) team performance measurement strategies, and (f) the critical role context plays in shaping teamwork and collaboration in practice. We also distill potential avenues for future research and highlight opportunities to understand the translation, dissemination, and implementation of evidence-based teamwork principles into practice.
We endeavored to develop an unruptured intracranial aneurysm (UIA) treatment score (UIATS) model that includes and quantifies key factors involved in clinical decision-making in the management of ...UIAs and to assess agreement for this model among specialists in UIA management and research.
An international multidisciplinary (neurosurgery, neuroradiology, neurology, clinical epidemiology) group of 69 specialists was convened to develop and validate the UIATS model using a Delphi consensus. For internal (39 panel members involved in identification of relevant features) and external validation (30 independent external reviewers), 30 selected UIA cases were used to analyze agreement with UIATS management recommendations based on a 5-point Likert scale (5 indicating strong agreement). Interrater agreement (IRA) was assessed with standardized coefficients of dispersion (vr*) (vr* = 0 indicating excellent agreement and vr* = 1 indicating poor agreement).
The UIATS accounts for 29 key factors in UIA management. Agreement with UIATS (mean Likert scores) was 4.2 (95% confidence interval CI 4.1-4.3) per reviewer for both reviewer cohorts; agreement per case was 4.3 (95% CI 4.1-4.4) for panel members and 4.5 (95% CI 4.3-4.6) for external reviewers (p = 0.017). Mean Likert scores were 4.2 (95% CI 4.1-4.3) for interventional reviewers (n = 56) and 4.1 (95% CI 3.9-4.4) for noninterventional reviewers (n = 12) (p = 0.290). Overall IRA (vr*) for both cohorts was 0.026 (95% CI 0.019-0.033).
This novel UIA decision guidance study captures an excellent consensus among highly informed individuals on UIA management, irrespective of their underlying specialty. Clinicians can use the UIATS as a comprehensive mechanism for indicating how a large group of specialists might manage an individual patient with a UIA.
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