Cleveland, OH – Collaboration has become quite a medical buzzword in recent years as healthcare reform has rolled on, but Case Western Reserve and the Cleveland Clinic have really taken its importance to heart – so much so that they’ve placed a half billion-dollar bet on it. A tremendous construction project is already well underway that will ultimately house the former’s schools of medicine, dentistry, and nursing alongside the latter’s own medical school. The driving force behind the project is a vision to build a spirit of collaboration into our future healthcare professionals right from the start.
For most of today’s doctors, nurses, dentists, and social workers, much of their early training took place in silos, surrounded by their own kind and separated from colleagues of other disciplines. Once they begin to care for real patients with complicated diseases, medical histories, and lives, they realize that they cannot heal a patient in a vacuum, and a diverse healthcare team is essential for an optimal outcome.
Upon the completion of this new integrated campus, students of many different healthcare disciplines will be trained alongside one another. They will have the opportunity to work together to brainstorm and tackle even the most complicated diseases as a team. For more information, please see Kaiser Health New’s article here: http://khn.org/news/teaching-medical-teamwork-right-from-the-start/.
Why This Matters –
For decades, healthcare marketers have focused on a specific audience for many of their messages: perhaps endocrinologists for a cutting edge diabetes therapy or pulmonologists for a new inhaled medication. In this new age of collaboration, the most effective advertising and sales messages will not only need to acknowledge the wider healthcare team, they will need to help each team member bring their best to the table for patients. For example, a campaign that can help doctors decide an appropriate therapy, nurses administer it, and social workers fit it into the patient’s everyday world could gain greater traction in this evolving landscape.
