The evidence for multidisciplinary care in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a chronic and slowly progressive neurodegenerative disease. Team-based care is required to address and manage the diverse array of motor and non-motor symptoms in PD and related conditions. As the evidence base for the efficacy of non-pharmacological treatment of PD is expanding, many different centers are implementing interdisciplinary models of care with allied health professionals trained in PD.

In this review, the authors outline these various models and review the evidence for multidisciplinary approaches to care in PD. They begin by defining the terms used to describe the spectrum of multidisciplinary and integrated care models, followed by synthesizing the evidence for these models in PD. The authors then highlight some representative models to illustrate the variety of multidisciplinary care interventions: a community network-based model, a day-hospital model, an academic clinic-based model, and an intensive inpatient rehabilitation model. The authors synthesize these results and suggest directions for team-based PD care for the future.

The future of medicine is team-based care that is decentralized and integrated vertically and horizontally across health systems. Building an evidence base for these complex interventions will require alternative models of evaluation other than randomized controlled trials.