Editorial: Inter-healthcare Professions Collaboration: Educational and Practical Aspects and New Developments

NF is a 62 year old female patient in good health. She is seeing her family physician for routine care, including managing her high blood pressure, annual checkups , immunizations, and standard screenings. She also sees a podiatrist regarding a heel spur on her right foot, a GI specialist for GERD, an ophthalmologist for follow-up care after cataract surgery, a physical therapist for left knee pain, a dentist for a new crown, and her pharmacist manages all of her medications. She has a preferred provider organization (PPO) insurance plan so she can select her own care givers without going through her primary care physician. As a result, her " team " does not share any network, nor do they share an electronic medical record. Is her investment in health care seeing optimal results? Who is managing her care? The likely answer to this question is no one and everyone. The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, yet ranks below other comparable countries on key criteria such as access, efficiency, and most importantly, health outcomes (Davis et al., 2014). For a primary care physician to take care of all needs, chronic and preventative, for an average panel of 2500 patients, they would need to work 21 h a day (Altschuler et al., 2012). Clearly this practice is not sustainable, nor is it seeing optimal results. Interprofessional collaboration, in particular, in patient-centered medical homes, is designed to deliver high-quality, team-based, patient-centered primary care. Evidence indicates that this approach increases health outcomes, in particular, those related to chronic diseases, and reduces emergency room visits, length of stay, specialty provider visits, all at tremendous cost savings (Nielsen et al., 2016). How do we as educators prepare our students for this new world of team-based patient-centered care? Interprofessional education is described as occurring when two or more professions learn about, from and with each other to enable effective collaboration and improve health outcomes (Health Professions Networks Nursing and Midwifery Human Resources for Health, 2010). The interprofessional education collaborative identified four domains of core competencies for interprofessional collaborative practice: values/ethics for interprofessional practice; roles and responsibilities; interprofessional communication; teams and teamwork (Interprofessional Education Expert Panel, 2011). A number of efforts to foster these core competencies are presented in this topic. For example, Tamayo et al. point out that, if efforts to improve empathy and attitudes toward interprofessional