The University of Michigan Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education (CIPE) is taking a major step forward with the selection of its proposal, “Scaling Interprofessional Education to Improve Human Health,” as a Tier 1 initiative through the University of Michigan’s Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF).
Over five years, the initiative will expand hands-on, team-based learning across all 26 U-M health science programs, spanning 10 schools and three campuses. Students will have more opportunities to learn alongside one another and apply their skills together in real clinical and community settings.
The initiative directly advances two of the Look to Michigan Vision’s Impact Areas: Life-Changing Education and Human Health and Well-Being. The SIF supports high-impact initiatives designed to create lasting, transformational change across the University and beyond.
From learning about teamwork to practicing it
For many health professions students, learning to work as part of a team can begin in the classroom. CIPE’s vision is to take that learning into the real-world settings where health care and community health happen.
Through the initiative, CIPE will scale TEAMS-Collaborate (Teams Engaging to Acquire Meaningful Skills), the most advanced level of CIPE’s interprofessional curriculum. Students will work alongside learners and professionals from other health disciplines on activities such as providing patient care, care planning, community health initiatives, and other collaborative efforts.
The goal is straightforward: students should have meaningful opportunities to practice working together before they enter a health care workforce that is dependent on interprofessional collaboration.
The future of health depends on how well we work together across our professions, but we must ensure that our students learn how to do this in real-world settings before they are launched into their careers. We don’t currently do this in a coordinated way at scale, but the SIF will allow us to change that. This investment gives U-M an extraordinary opportunity to connect our health science schools, health system, and community partners around a shared vision for how we prepare the next generation of health professionals.”
Rajesh Mangrulkar, MD, FNAP, CIPE director
The initiative builds on more than a decade of work by CIPE to connect health professions education across U-M. Since its founding in 2015, the center has developed an interprofessional curriculum that engages thousands of learners across the University’s health science schools, building hands-on opportunities that allow students to learn with, from, and about one another.
That foundation provides a strong platform for the next phase of CIPE’s work: moving from smaller-scale experiential opportunities toward a model that can reach students across all 26 health science programs.
Connecting education, health, and community
The initiative also recognizes that interprofessional education is most meaningful when it connects directly to the needs of patients, health systems, and communities.
Students participating in TEAMS-Collaborate will work together on activities such as patient care planning, community health assessment, quality improvement, care coordination, and health education. Their experiences may take place in clinical settings, community organizations, or other environments where students can contribute to real-world health challenges alongside professionals and community partners.
For example, an interprofessional student team in a family medicine clinic might work together with a patient managing multiple chronic conditions. As the team develops a care plan, students may discover that challenges outside the clinic, such as housing or food instability, are affecting the patient’s ability to manage their health. Working together, the students can identify resources, adapt the care plan, and connect the patient with support in both the health system and the community.
These experiences can help students understand an essential lesson early in their careers: improving health often requires more than the expertise of any one profession or organization.
This investment will give more students the chance to experience and practice what collaborative care really looks like, in the places where health care and community health happen. When students learn to navigate complex needs together, they are better prepared to carry that collaborative mindset into their careers and the communities they serve.”
Vani Patterson, MPH, FNAP, CIPE administrative director
Building toward a university-wide model
Scaling hands-on, team-based learning across U-M will require more than creating additional student experiences. Over the five-year initiative, CIPE will work with health science schools, academic leaders, health system partners, and community organizations to build the infrastructure needed to make those experiences sustainable.
The work will include developing an implementation plan, preparing faculty and preceptors to support interprofessional learning, creating systems to track student participation and outcomes, and evaluating the initiative’s impact on learners, educators, health systems, and communities.
CIPE will also examine how students participating in these experiences contribute to the organizations and communities where they learn, including whether their work can help partners reach more patients and clients or expand services and programs.
The scale of the opportunity is significant. U-M has more than 5,000 health science learners across its three campuses, with more than half already participating in interprofessional learning through CIPE. The SIF investment creates an opportunity to build on that foundation and make meaningful hands-on, team-based learning a more consistent part of health professions education at U-M.
The work also reflects the collaborative spirit at the heart of CIPE. The initiative will bring together U-M’s health science schools and programs, Michigan Medicine, and community partners around a shared vision for team-based education and practice. By connecting learners with health systems and community organizations, the initiative aims to create value for the patients, populations, and communities they serve while helping prepare a workforce equipped for increasingly complex health challenges.
As U-M looks toward the future of health, this work reflects a simple idea: if the health challenges ahead are increasingly complex, then how we prepare the people who will address them must evolve, too, with collaboration at its center.