Patterns of collaboration and non-collaboration among physicians

Abstract

This work present an empirical evaluation of factors that discourage a stronger collaboration of physicians across time. By observing two different outpatient clinics in which a single patient is treated by a sequence of physicians for a long period, we were able to detect three aspects of a (paper) patient record that makes collaboration difficult: lack of diagnostic rationale, lack of treatment rationale and improper way of presenting the information contained in the patient record.