Shreya Louis

Collaborative work was one part of why I came to this medical school. I think it is important to change the stereotype/pattern that doctors value their opinions above other healthcare professionals in the team. After speaking to a lot of my healthcare friends who have felt undervalued on a healthcare team or that a hierarchical structure was at play, I realized how important teamwork is and knowing when my expertise as a future physician ends and when to rely on other members of a team..

So far, I have already had different types of exposure to interprofessionalism. The main way I have been exposed so far is to other research professionals in my summer block. As medical students we are normally taught to just learn from lectures and other MD’s, but at Lerner we have been collaborating with research professionals to gain a better understanding of basic science research and how it could relate to medicine to help us develop hypothesis formation. Along with this, my masters class in bioinformatics at Case Western Reserve University taught me how to be an interprofessional with other engineers and systems biology masters students to approach healthcare from a new perspective. In the masters program, we learn how health information is created, stored and utilized in formats such as electronic medical records.