Opportunities to Apply Systems Engineering to Healthcare Interprofessional Education

In medical settings, interprofessional education (IPE) plays an important role by bringing students from multiple disciplines together to learn how to collaborate effectively and coordinate safe patient care. Yet developing effective IPE is complex, considering that stakeholders from different schools and programs are involved, each with varying curriculum requirements and interests. Given its critical importance and inherent complexity, innovative approaches to address these challenges are needed to effectively develop and sustain effective IPE programs. Systems engineering (SE) combines a lifecycle perspective with established interdisciplinary processes to develop and sustain large complex systems. The need for SE approaches to manage healthcare complexity has been recognized, but the application of SE to IPE programs has been limited. We believe that there is a significant opportunity for IPE programs to benefit from the application of SE. The common themes running through SE and IPE led us to ask if SE can be used to address IPE complexity and achieve desired IPE outcomes. We believe that SE could facilitate further development and sustainability of a recently developed healthcare curriculum. We also propose to use SE to accelerate and manage future IPE curriculum development, while better understanding the states of vital IPE-related components. We discuss a framework that considers transitions of key IPE elements. We believe that use of interdisciplinary SE processes and holistic perspectives and methods such as system thinking will improve the management of system challenges while addressing IPE’s inherent complexity and leading to better patient outcomes and more effective interprofessional collaboration.