Collaborative Clinical Reasoning-A Systematic Review of Empirical Studies

Health care delivery involves multiple health professions, and increasingly, diagnostic and therapeutic decisions are made through interprofessional teamwork. We define collaborative clinical reasoning (CCR) as the process in which two or more health care team members negotiate diagnostic, therapeutic, or prognostic issues of an individual patient resulting in an illness or treatment plan (and to reduce uncertainty). In a systematic review, we aimed to answer the following research question: Which empirically observable factors are considered crucial influences on performance in CCR in current empirical research?

A systematic literature review was conducted. We included empirical studies taking place in a hospital setting, with a clear focus on CCR and published between January 1990 and September 2014. The studies were only included when at least one physician was part of the team. Nine articles were included in the review.

The factors crucially influencing the CCR performance (ie, diagnosis or treatment plan of patients) are (1) the initial distribution of information over team members, (2) clinical experience of physicians within a team, (3) information exchange within a team, and (4) individual retrieval of information from the team or information representation.

Despite the sparse empirical evidence on CCR, four factors influencing performance were extracted from the literature. Overall, there is little evidence though how each of these factors actually influences CCR performance. Thus, we need more empirical studies to better understand and foster CCR performance.