How Patients and Doctors Feel About Team Care for Skin Conditions

Immune-related skin issues, like psoriasis or lupus, can affect many parts of the body. To manage these conditions better, doctors from different fields often team up. This is called interdisciplinary care (IC). But how do patients and healthcare providers feel about this team approach? That's what researchers wanted to find out. They searched through various studies to see what patients and doctors thought about IC. They found 21 studies that fit their criteria. Fourteen of these studies showed that both patients and doctors had good experiences with specific IC programs. However, seven studies from broader regions reported less satisfaction.

Patients and doctors both agreed on certain important aspects of IC. These included general satisfaction, how they interacted with each other, the information shared, how well the IC functioned, and the benefits it brought. Patients also stressed the importance of easy access to care and effective disease management. Doctors found that understanding the illness was crucial. One challenge is that different studies measured IC experience in different ways. This makes it hard to compare results. So, researchers suggest creating standard tools to measure IC outcomes. They also think future research should include not just patient and doctor experiences, but also medical, process, and financial outcomes.

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