Interdisciplinary communication to efficiently develop integrated pharmacotherapeutic sessions

Integration of clinical, biomedical, social, administrative, and pharmaceutical sciences in a pharmacotherapeutics course is beneficial to student education. Unfortunately, the perceived increase in time, commitment, and workload required to produce integrated material often serves as a barrier to high level academic integration. This commentary discusses how interdisciplinary faculty communication started at the beginning of content development, using an initial brief planning session and ongoing unscheduled flexible methods, can efficiently produce integrated material without substantially increasing faculty workload compared to independently produced integrated course material.

Content development can be streamlined during a short initial meeting to consider the relevant disciplines (e.g., pharmacology, medicinal chemistry, clinical sciences) for a topic and to collaboratively develop corresponding content outlines. To produce fully integrated material, collaborators should develop content using a cloud-based file sharing system and communicate using asynchronous, electronic means to ask questions and provide suggestions to collaborators.

Interdisciplinary communication is the foundation of integrated pharmacotherapeutic sessions, but supplemental meetings in addition to already required faculty meetings are both challenging to schedule and time consuming. With proper planning and the deliberate use of both continuous file sharing and asynchronous electronic communication, educators can produce parallel content emphasizing key concepts across disciplines without substantially increasing faculty workload.