Time management in cross-functional medical projects: business communications as a factor of effective interaction in multidisciplinary teams
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26661/2522-1566/2026-3/37-27Keywords:
time management, multidisciplinary rehabilitation team, business communication, stand-up briefing, RACI matrix, cross-functional project, healthcare managementAbstract
Ukrainian rehabilitation units now work through multidisciplinary teams, and in our unit the team ran short of time before it ran short of anything else. Much of that time went on coordination. The purpose of this article is to find out how structured business communication changes the way a rehabilitation team uses its working time. We studied the communication processes of the team in a 20-bed modular rehabilitation unit of a municipal hospital; the team included a physician, physical and occupational therapists, a speech and language therapist, a psychologist and nurses. The design was single-centre, before and after, with no control group. Methods included work-day photography, time measurement of six communication and administrative processes per patient over a 14-day cycle, value stream mapping and an anonymous staff survey. At baseline the physician spent 60% of working time on documentation and oral coordination, and between admission and the start of full therapy patients spent about 90% of the time waiting. We then introduced stand-up briefings of up to 15 minutes, a RACI matrix with one accountable person per process, and a shared information environment where clinical scales are entered once. Communication and administrative time dropped from 200 to 110 minutes per patient (by 45%). Ad hoc oral consultations fell from 30 to 10 minutes, the share of planned sessions delivered rose from 82% to 96%, and documentation errors went down from 12 to 2 a month. Because the team was small and there was no control unit, these figures show an association and cannot prove cause. For management research the article offers a way to treat one patient's rehabilitation cycle as a time-bound project and to count coordination time per patient. In practice the model is cheap, and other units can repeat it together with the measurement procedure.
JEL: D23, I11, M12, M54.
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