Collaboration and Communication among Healthcare Providers

For communication to be effective, it must be complete, clear, concise, and timely. However, various factors can interfere with the effective exchange ​of information. Healthcare risk management and patient safety literature contain numerous accounts of medical errors caused by communication failures.

Information may be missed, ignored, not recorded, or misdirected, but it is also possible to misunderstand the content, either because of hearing impediments (physiological or due to a noisy environment), language or cultural barriers, or due to incomplete information or failure to organize the information. Additional barriers to effective communication can include time constraints, organizational hierarchies, defensiveness, distractions, fatigue, workplace conflict, and workload (ACOG).

Strategies described in this article focus on communication among healthcare professionals. For additional strategies on effective communication between providers and patients, see Supplementary Materials.

Aggregate results from surveys of medical office staff to evaluate their organization's safety culture reveal the need to enhance strategies to improve communication. Results from the 2022 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) medical office survey indicate that although staff gave high scores to their organizations for patient care tracking and follow-up (85% positive response) and fostering teamwork (85% positive response), other dimensions indicative of effective communication scored less favorably. These areas include communication about errors and adverse events (72% positive response) and communication openness (69% positive response). (AHRQ "Famolaro et al.")

Communication failures can have a significant financial impact on the organization if they...