Collaboration in clinic care is the winning strategy for patients.
Erik Klein In News 0 comment 68 ViewsWe Stopped Treating Alone and Patients Got Better
Most healthcare providers claim they support interprofessional collaboration. Their referral patterns tell a different story.
We’ve moved beyond the traditional multidisciplinary model where multiple practitioners work on the same problem without actually working together. At our clinic, we’ve built something different: an interdisciplinary system where practitioners have regular touchpoints throughout the week to discuss cases and coordinate care.
This matters especially for pregnancy care, where you’re treating two individuals (Mom and Baby) through a massive life-changing event.
What Interdisciplinary Actually Looks Like
Sometimes our touchpoints are brief. One practitioner follows a patient into another practitioner’s office at the end of an appointment. Sometimes both practitioners sit with the pregnant patient to discuss what’s happening.
But the real work happens before patients walk through the door.
Each profession takes time to educate the others about their full scope of practice. Our chiropractors understand what our women’s health physiotherapists can do. Our massage therapists know when to loop in our chiropractors. Everyone knows the complete toolkit available.
We also make sure patients know we’ll collaborate. With their consent, practitioners share notes. We highlight key information in charts. We communicate verbally and in writing. And we work with patients’ primary care providers, whether that’s an OB-GYN, nurse practitioner, midwife, or doula.
The care extends beyond our walls.
The Missing Link We Didn’t Know We Needed
Four years ago, we brought Lauren Richardson onto our team. She’s a women’s health and pelvic floor specialty physiotherapist.
I had no idea this was the missing link in our practice.
The realization hit with a specific patient. She had intractable hip pain. I tried everything I could think of. The needle wasn’t moving.
I sent her to Lauren.
The problem was the obturator internus muscle, a deep hip muscle that can only be accessed through pelvic floor assessment. It was literally out of reach for me.
Lauren fixed the patient in three visits.
That’s our metric: we want to see the needle move within three visits. Not cured necessarily, but clear positive progress. When that doesn’t happen, we bring in someone with a different set of eyes.
Research backs this approach. Studies show that collaborative care reduces early labor admissions by 76% compared to standard obstetric care. The coordination matters.
Reframing the Referral
Here’s what most doctors struggle with: stepping back from being the primary clinician feels like failure.
We see it differently.
At our clinic, we consider referring a patient to another practitioner and that practitioner fixing the problem is as good as fixing it ourselves. We see the referral itself as a therapeutic intervention.
When you apply a therapeutic modality to a patient and that patient improves, you’ve made a good clinical decision. The referral is the treatment.
This reframe changes everything.
When we tell a patient, “I’m bringing in more of the team to get to the bottom of your problem in the fastest way possible,” they don’t feel passed around. They feel supported.
And we don’t disappear. Just because I step away as the primary clinician doesn’t mean I step away from the patient. I’m there in a supportive role. The patient still sees me when they come in for other appointments.
They know they’re still being cared for.
Training the Next Generation
Younger practitioners face external pressures that make referrals difficult. There’s the income factor. If you refer someone out, you’re not seeing them as much.
There’s also the credit concern. If you’re not the person who fixes them, you won’t get referrals from that patient or their family.
We address this directly in our training.
When you refer someone to a massage therapist or physiotherapist and that person sorts the patient out, you get the credit for making a positive referral. That patient will send you their friends and family. They’ll come back for future problems.
You’ve shown yourself to be true of heart, looking out for their best interest rather than just trying to pay your bills.
The dividends from making a good referral exceed two or three struggling treatment sessions. We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. Patients tell us, “I sent my dad here because I knew you’d take care of him. I told him if you can’t figure it out, you’ll engage your entire team.”
That builds trust.
And trust builds patient volume.
Research shows patient trust correlates with better health behaviors, fewer symptoms, higher quality of life, and greater treatment satisfaction. We’re at a point where many patients don’t trust their care providers or the system. We’re actively working to keep that trust within the clinic.
The Communication That Actually Works
Here’s a practical problem: OB-GYNs and midwives don’t have time to read five-page reports from allied health providers.
We frame our clinical notes around that reality.
We write large, bold points with big-time takeaways. We highlight clinical questions that need answers. Then in the background, we include pertinent details the practitioner might need but won’t get in a general history.
The format makes it easy to scan the critical information and clinical questions, with background details available if needed.
This matters because communication breakdown is the leading cause of perinatal death and disability, accounting for 72% of cases in one analysis. Most failures stem from organizational culture, including hierarchy and failure to function as a team.
Simple communication fixes prevent complex problems.
Why Pregnancy Demands This Approach
Pregnancy care requires interprofessional collaboration because you’re ensuring the best outcome for two individuals through a transformative event.
Not every patient has access to this kind of coordinated care. That doesn’t mean their outcomes will be bad. Individual practitioners provide great care all the time.
But collaboration stacks the odds in our favor.
Lauren performs birth prep appointments where she identifies movement deficits that might complicate delivery and corrects them before they become problems. She’s refined our approach to sacroiliac joint belts, athletic taping techniques, hip balancing, and corrective exercises.
Her insights have made our chiropractors better. Our chiropractors’ experience has enhanced her approach. Our massage therapists bring their specialized pregnancy training. Everyone elevates everyone else.
The patient gets the benefit of decades of combined experience working in concert rather than in sequence.
The Real Barrier
We don’t track referral patterns on spreadsheets. If your main focus is providing powerful clinical care, you can’t obsess over obscure practice metrics.
But we know the system works because patients come back. They send their families. They tell us they trust us to figure things out or engage the entire team if needed.
The barrier at other clinics isn’t systems or logistics. It’s mindset.
When you see referrals as admissions of inadequacy rather than therapeutic interventions, you’ll hold onto cases too long. When you operate from scarcity rather than abundance, you’ll protect your patient list instead of building your reputation.
We’ve chosen differently.
At our clinic, we have chiropractors with decades of experience, women’s health specialty physiotherapists with decades of experience, and massage therapists particularly trained in pregnancy massage with decades of experience. We have special outreach to personal trainers who specialize in working with moms pre- and postpartum.
We just have a lot of really happy people working together to make for really happy patients.
That’s the whole model.