No single medical professional holds all the solutions for health and wellness. Having multiple specialists in addition to a primary care physician should allow you to make more informed decisions and maximize your access to effective treatment solutions.
Unfortunately, even great doctors may fail to make full use of interprofessional collaboration. This isn’t necessarily due to the inadequacy of any specific doctor. Rather, long-standing norms simply don’t emphasize collaboration as a vital component of care.
Some specialists, including the proton therapy experts at Hampton Proton, are determined to change that.
As a cancer treatment center with a narrow focus on providing proton therapy, we will always be just one part of your medical team. Establishing and nurturing good working relationships with the primary care doctors, oncologists and specialists who manage our patients’ care is vital to our mission.
Working Together to Support Your Healthcare Outcomes
Fragmented healthcare is just one of many hurdles that stand between patients and optimal treatment outcomes. The good news is fragmented care can be easily overcome through interprofessional collaboration and communication. When specialists collaborate on a patient’s care plan, they are far less likely to make mistakes, prescribe dangerous or ineffective treatments or misdiagnosis ailments.
Interprofessional collaboration requires more than one doctor simply forwarding your medical records to a different specialist. Your doctors should actively share ideas, brainstorm and design an integrated plan of care to meet your unique needs.
This unified approach is especially important for patients with cancer, as the outcome of your treatment plan will have a lasting impact on you and your family.
Preventing Errors
“Medication overload” (or polypharmacy) is a recognized problem in American medicine. It’s a scenario in which different specialists prescribe multiple medications to treat the same condition. Elderly Americans will suffer an estimated 74 million adverse drug events due to polypharmacy over the next decade, which is expected to result in roughly five million hospitalizations. The problem is fundamentally caused by poor communication among doctors, and it’s a risk that can be easily eliminated through collaboration.
Keep Costs Down
Mistakes, delays and redundancies in testing and treatment can waste time and drive up your care costs and travel expenses. Interprofessional collaboration makes your healthcare dollars go further by streamlining your care across specialists and eliminating operational redundancies.
Better Outcomes Lead to Superior Patient and Doctor Satisfaction
Most doctors are passionate about helping people, and exceptional patient outcomes have a knock-on effect. Doctors experience better job satisfaction when patients enjoy optimal results, leading to better patient care and job performance across the board.
We hope our collaborative approach leads to superior patient outcomes and doctor satisfaction for the specialist with whom we work. Ideally, doctors who experience the benefits of interprofessional collaboration will further adopt it in their own practices.
Make Hampton University Proton Cancer Institute Part of Your Medical Team
Your health isn’t a competition. All your doctors are working toward the same goal. It’s only natural that they collaborate. At Hampton Proton, we take pride in our ability to utilize the knowledge and commitment of your exiting primary care doctor, oncologist and other specialists to enhance your proton therapy cancer treatment outcomes.
You can learn more about proton therapy and our collaborative approach to care by calling us at 757.251.6800.