Opening communication among health professions

Short White Coat is a blog about learning to be a doctor. Posts appear here as part of White Coat Notes. Ishani Ganguli is a third-year Harvard medical student. E-mail her at shortwhitecoat@gmail.com.

On Saturday, I observed a rare convergence of health professional students outside hospital walls.

It was the first annual face-to-face meeting of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's Open School for Health Professions -- a hub of online courses, case studies, and discussion forums that empowers students to work on quality improvement issues. The school launched last fall and has already registered 9,000 students, with more than 78 school and hospital-based chapters in 25 states and 10 countries, director Jill Duncan told me.

During daytime sessions, student chapter leaders and faculty advisors of medical, nursing, and pharmacy schools swapped ideas on how to engage students on topics such as teamwork and patient-centered care -- using everything from role-play and board games over pizza and beer to a healthcare improvement decathlon designed to raise awareness.

Throughout the cocktail hour that followed, business cards flew as we noshed on deviled eggs and spanakopita. I chatted with a nursing student with an MBA, and another earning a master's of health administration, about their plans for upcoming chapter meetings. Wheels turned audibly ("Our school is so close to yours, why don’t we join forces?") as collaborations and friendships were forged.

Such interactions are all too infrequent, at least in my experience as a medical student. Despite having a pharmacy school down the street, we spend our pre-clinical years wearing blinders, spinning in a tightly wound cycle of classes and exams. It wasn’t until I started my third year at Brigham and Women's Hospital last May that I began to appreciate the level of interdependency in the hospital ecosystem, or even to understand what physician assistants and pharmacists do in the first place.

Team communication is critical to the quality improvement efforts of organizations like the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and starting this communication early is long overdue. Open School, and Saturday’s meeting in particular, is certainly a promising step in that direction.