Optimal Interprofessional Teaming and Care Coordination Strategies for Cancer Care Quality and Outcomes

Post Date: February 14, 2026

Expiration Date: February 13, 2027

Purpose

NIH seeks to understand and improve interprofessional teamwork and coordination during cancer screening, diagnosis, and/or treatment. Research is needed to:

• Identify aspects of interprofessional teaming linked to care quality and outcomes for people with cancer, including behavioral, cognitive, and organizational mechanisms underlying effective interprofessional teaming and optimal coordination of care 
• Develop strategies to address team-based care coordination challenges within and between care settings.

Background

Care coordination challenges are growing as expanding screening and treatment options, multi-modality treatment regimens, increasing comorbidity, and the delivery of care across large, diverse, and often fragmented health systems intensify demands for interprofessional team-based cancer care.  For many patients, these interprofessional teams must coordinate care decisions and tasks across inpatient, outpatient, home, community, and tertiary settings. Given interprofessional team members are not co-located, teaming requires use of health information technology or other tools (e.g., virtual tumor boards). The effectiveness of interprofessional teamwork and coordination within and across care settings impacts clinical outcomes and patient experience.

NIH seeks research ideas related to this topic that advances actionable knowledge about how to design and carry out effective, efficient interprofessional team-based cancer care that improves care quality, and clinical outcomes. 

For example, relevant research may include formative R21 or R03-level research to:

• Identify modifiable features of care team structure or teamwork processes associated with cancer-related care, outcomes, or variation in outcomes
• Develop and test measures of related teamwork constructs
• Develop and pilot test interventions

Relevant R01 or P01-level research may include:

• Studies evaluating interventions designed to improve care quality and patient outcomes by improving interprofessional teamwork and coordination, 
• Longitudinal or mixed-methods studies using health services data

1. Applicants are strongly encouraged to consider existing team effectiveness theories and frameworks to inform hypotheses and partnership with team effectiveness scientists. Studies should identify specific aspects of teamwork targeted for study, related hypotheses, and engage appropriate methods for identifying associations or impacts of targeted teamwork constructs on patient outcomes of interest.