A diverse healthcare team sits together at a table in discussion, representing interprofessional collaborative practice.

Your Initiative May Be Collaborative. That Does Not Mean It Is Interprofessional.

Interprofessional Collaborative Practice and Education

August 02, 2026•2 min read

Collaborative and interprofessional are not the same thing. Most healthcare leaders are familiar with the word interprofessional, but fewer have been shown the meaningful differences between a multidisciplinary project, an interdisciplinary project, and an interprofessional one. Those differences are not just terminology. They describe how professions and departments relate to each other inside the work, how decisions get made, how accountability is shared, and ultimately, what outcomes the initiative can produce.

What level of collaboration is your project actually designed at?

You are meeting with colleagues from other departments and service lines. You are working on a shared initiative. It feels collaborative, and it is. The question worth sitting with is what level of collaboration it is actually designed at.

A multidisciplinary project brings different departments and professions together, but each largely contributes from within their own lane. An interdisciplinary project adds more coordination and communication across those lanes. An interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP) project is designed so that the professions and departments are shaping the work together, with shared accountability for a shared outcome and evidence-based practices built into how the team functions.

Why the level of design determines the level of outcome

The outcomes you can achieve are connected to the level at which the collaboration is designed.

A 2019 study published in the Annals of Family Medicine examining an IPCP model implemented within a family medicine residency and ambulatory care center found that high-risk patients experienced 16.7 percent fewer emergency department visits, 17.7 percent fewer hospitalizations, a 0.8 percent reduction in hemoglobin A1c levels, and a 48.2 percent reduction in total patient charges. Those results did not come from a multidisciplinary project where each profession contributed from its own lane. They came from a project designed so that departments and professions were integrated into the structure of the work itself.

That is the kind of result that travels beyond a single department. It is visible, measurable, and reflects a level of leadership that decision-makers can see and understand.

A question worth bringing to your current work

If you are involved in cross-department or cross-profession work right now, it is worth reflecting on the level the initiative is actually designed at. Not what level you hope it reaches, but what level is built into how you are working together.

The team you name is the team you build. The structure you design is the structure that determines what your initiative can produce.

Where to go next

For a deeper foundation in understanding the differences between all three team models, the free team types video provides clarity on what distinguishes multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and interprofessional work in practice.

Watch the free team types video here.

For the foundational posts in this series on what IPCP is and how it is designed, start here.

What is Interprofessional Collaborative Practice?

Differences in Healthcare Team Types.

Reach out if you are ready to structure collaboration more intentionally.

We are better together...and better does not happen by accident.

Visit collaborateforhealth.com

Tina Patel Gunaldo, PhD, DPT, MHS

Tina Patel Gunaldo, PhD, DPT, MHS, is a physical therapist and leader in interprofessional education and collaborative practice. As a coordinator leading health equity and interprofessional collaboration efforts within a healthcare system, she aligns clinical operations with CMS, Joint Commission, and state quality priorities. Previously, as inaugural Director of the Center for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice at LSU Health New Orleans, she built a required two-year curriculum reaching 1,500 learners annually across 19 health professions and founded the Louisiana Interprofessional Consortium, uniting 25 institutions statewide. She served as Co-President of the American Interprofessional Health Collaborative and serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Interprofessional Education and Practice. She is co-author of Interprofessional Education and Collaboration: An Evidence-Based Approach to Optimizing Health Care, published through Human Kinetics, with a second edition forthcoming in Spring 2027. She has authored more than 40 peer-reviewed publications and delivered more than 150 presentations nationally and internationally. Through Collaborate for Health, she helps healthcare leaders and organizations apply interprofessional collaboration principles to design cross-department work that produces measurable system-level outcomes.

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