Collaborating and communicating across disciplinary boundaries in Biomedical Engineering

Abstract

This graduation thesis forms an inquiry into the cross-disciplinary collaborative practice in Biomedical Engineering in the Netherlands. The rationale of this study was provided by Professor Jenny Dankelman (BioMechanical Engineering, TU Delft) who indicated that she would like to gain better understanding of the collaboration process of technical experts and health care experts. Professor Dankelman’s experiences and a literature study showed that cross-disciplinary collaboration is challenging because of diverse group of disciplinary experts with differing perspectives need to develop a common working understanding in their collaborative project. To explore how these challenges took form in cross-disciplinary collaboration in Biomedical Engineering in the Netherlands, we conducted a qualitative case study of a cross-disciplinary project between a technical university and a peripheral hospital (the DORA project). The main goal was to create more awareness within team DORA of the challenges and opportunities of the collaboration process. We used Deanna D. Pennington’s framework of team actualization as a conceptual springboard to empirical investigation. She maintains that effective cross-disciplinary collaboration depends partly on a group’s capacity to value different disciplinary perspectives appropriately and to accommodate those perspectives in a shared research vision that makes full use of the diverse expertise available in the group. Team actualization represents an ideal type of situation in which cross-disciplinary experts can work autonomously but the team is effective because every expert knows how his/her fits in the shared vision that drives the team effort. The main research question of this research project was as follows: To what extent does team actualization enable participants of the DORA project in the collaboration process? To answer this research question we employed a qualitative research strategy and an inductive-deductive approach to data analysis. The concepts constituting team actualization were used as sensitizing concepts in setting up an interview guide for semi-structured interviewing. Sensitizing concepts are often used in qualitative research as springboards to investigate empirical instances. The main research method comprised 9 semi-structured interviews with key participants of the DORA project. These data were complemented by observations of interactions between participants in the DORA project at 11 meetings. We used a thematic analysis to analyze the data. This process was initially inductive of nature, which means that the first interviews were coded using ‘open’ codes that stayed close to the data. These codes were used to set up a ‘closed’ coding framework with which the remaining interviews were coded. The observational notes were used as aid in the interpretation of themes that emerged from the interview data. The findings of this study suggest that team actualization within the context of the DORA project is characterized by the following: •The research vision of the technical university researchers incorporated the interests of the hospital and acted as an important driver of this collaboration. The vision was broadly supported by the team members and seemed to mediate the different perspectives that were present in this collaboration. •The team of researchers and health care professionals had a contact group as the main decision-making organ. The long-standing relationships and familiarity between key members of the contact group had resulted in a firm basis of trust, which manifested itself in informal decision-making based on verbal agreements. •One team member played a crucial role in safeguarding the substantive progress of the collaboration by monitoring research activities in the hospital. In this way she was pivotal to the effectiveness of team DORA’s collaboration process and therefore helped team DORA to become actualized. Based on our findings we want to raise team DORA’s awareness for the following points: •Team DORA is effective in reaching their goals due to the presence of a content manager in the collaboration process. This is potentially a good strategy for effective collaboration because the team does not need to set up a very dense substantive shared vision in which all individual perspectives of team members are incorporated. Then the team should enable one member to be the manager of the collaboration process and explicitly discuss what he or she needs to make the collaboration move forward. •When a content manager is elusive, team members will probably have to build a substantive shared vision for the collaboration to progress. The firm basis of trust can then be used a springboard to a substantive shared vision that integrates different disciplinary perspectives present in the collaboration. •According to the points above, there are two ways for team DORA to expand their network. First, a new actor may be familiar with the common history of interaction and the long-standing relationships of team DORA. The basis of trust of team DORA will probably ensure an easy entry of the new actor into the team. Second, a new actor may be interested to join the collaboration, but not have the proper social connections with team DORA. According to our understanding of the collaborative process of team DORA, this means that the content manager will be the main entry point for the new actor. According to our knowledge, this is the first social scientific study into cross-disciplinary collaboration in Biomedical Engineering in the Netherlands. We hope that this inspires further study of the collaborative practice in this field and we recommend the following topics for future research: • What organizational structured and management styles are required for effective cross-disciplinary collaboration (in terms of reaching intended goals) in Biomedical Engineering? • How do the social relationships between different disciplinary experts in a collaboration affect communication in cross-disciplinary problem solving in Biomedical Engineering? •How do individual differences in framing of the content of a collaboration (research problem, goals etc.) affect communication in cross-disciplinary problem solving in Biomedical Engineering?