Interprofessional teams see differently: a cross-over study using dual mobile eye-tracking

It is widely assumed that interprofessional teams (IP) attend to broader range of clinical information than monoprofessional teams (MP), because each profession is trained to prioritize different aspects of patient care. Yet no study has empirically tested this assumption. We conducted a randomized cross-over study, where medical and nursing students in their fourth year worked together in teams of two on paper-based clinical cases, and in three different team compositions: medical+medical (MP_Med), nursing+nursing (MP_Nurse), and medical+nursing (IP). We used mobile eye-tracking glasses on both team members simultaneously to record where each person looked, and measured how long they spent attending visually to different types of clinical information. Comparing both monoprofessional conditions, we found that MP_Med teams spent more time looking at medical-specific information, while MP_Nurse teams focused more on nursing-specific information (β = 0.86, 95% CI [0.24, 1.47]). IP teams, by contrast, tended to focus on both types of information. To understand what drove this mixture, we examined how individual members in IP teams allocated their visual attention, specifically, whether the two professions converged towards shared gaze pattern or diverged. We observed that medical students maintained their medical-specific focus while nursing students retained their nursing-specific focus, indicating that the integrated team-level pattern emerged from profession-specific attention rather than convergence. This study found evidence for profession-specific perceptual templates formed early in health professions training. Importantly, when working together in interprofessional teams, these templates persisted. These findings offer a novel, perception-level perspective of how professional diversity in teams shape clinical collaboration, and caution against training approaches that seek to standardize attentional patterns across professions before their complementary value is better understood.