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

You are meeting with colleagues from other departments and service lines. You are working on a shared initiative. It feels collaborative, and it is.

What level of collaboration is your project actually designed at?

Most healthcare leaders are familiar with the word interprofessional. 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.

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 project is designed so that the professions and departments are shaping the work together, with shared accountability for a shared outcome using evidence-based practices.

Why does this matter for the work you are leading?

The outcomes you can achieve are connected to the level at which the collaboration is designed. A project designed at the multidisciplinary level will produce a certain kind of result. A project designed interprofessionally, where departments and professions are integrated into the structure of the work itself, can produce something the system has not seen from any one department working alone.

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

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. It is not about what level do we hope it reaches, but what level is built into how we are working together?

Collaborate for Health equips department-level healthcare leaders with the skills to structure cross-department and interprofessional collaboration that produces system-level results and positions them for advancement.

Let’s collaborate for health. We are better together.

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