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Background One of the greatest challenges faced by academic health centers is assembling the diverse teams that are essential to solving the complex problems associated with modern health care delivery. In order to address this problem, OHSU has established the Program for Medical Innovation, whose goal is to foster novel approaches to research in the OHSU clinical environment. The Program's strategy is to establish cross-disciplinary collaborations among OHSU scientists, and between OHSU and other partners, in ways that expand the current traditional alliances that predominate in the complex academic health facility. Our primary objective is to promote the creation of diverse and dynamic teams - collaborations comprised of experts from academia, government, and industry - who have easy and direct access to a state-of-the-art health care environment. The expected outcome of these collaborations will be new research opportunities that pair problem identification with the development and testing of innovative solutions for a wide range of issues in health care, health promotion, and health status monitoring. It's our premise that new problems, in addition to the ongoing traditional one ("How do we deliver health care, monitor patients, reduce costs, reduce in-hospital adverse events, comply with treatment guidelines, and provide consumer-centered care?") can best be solved by teaming all players - ranging from nurses to doctors to administration to family members and support staff - with the key addition of including appropriate outside technical developers and skilled engineers. "...if teams have a preponderance of incumbent-incumbent links, it is less likely that they will have innovative ideas because their shared experiences tend to homogenize their pool of knowledge. In contrast, teams with a variety of types of links are likely to have more diverse perspectives to draw from and therefore to contribute more innovative solutions." (Team Assembly Mechanisms Determine Collaboration Network Structure and Team Performance, Science April 29, 2005) |
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