Network analysis approaches to collaborative information seeking in inter-professional health care teams

Introduction: It is widely believed that interprofessional health care teams can improve patient care and increase safety; however, intra-team communication has often proven to be problematic. One particularly important aspect of this problem is how teams collaborate to seek the information needed to address the issues they are confronting. Network analysis offers a rich set of concepts for tackling this problem. Method: Review essay. Analysis and results: Network analysis approaches offer the promise of more nuanced approaches and diagnostic tools that could address these issues by focusing on its elements: reciprocity, centrality, density, fault lines, multi-team systems, fields and/or pathways, knowing where to go, and transactive memory. Conclusion: Network analysis of interprofessional health care teams holds much promise for addressing many current health care problems such as diagnosing fault lines in teams that lead to the blockage of critical information related to care.