The research, led by Teresa M. Cochran of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Allied Health Professions, together with colleagues at Creighton University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Nebraska at Kearney, tested what the team calls a longitudinal tele-team model. Thirty-two health professions students from four disciplines—physical therapy, occupational therapy, medical nutrition, and speech-language pathology—were organized into small interprofessional teams. Each team met six times over a sustained period with community-dwelling stroke survivors, conducting sessions remotely via telehealth. The design deliberately paired the authenticity of real patient relationships with the accessibility of virtual delivery, allowing students in different programs and locations to collaborate without the logistical barriers that often doom interprofessional education initiatives.

What makes the study methodologically interesting is that it did not rely on a single measure of success. The researchers used a convergent mixed methods design, combining quantitative surveys with qualitative focus groups to capture both the magnitude and the texture of change. Students completed the Interprofessional Collaborative Competency Attainment Survey, or ICCAS, as a retrospective pre-post instrument, meaning they rated their own competencies before and after the experience in a single sitting—a technique that reduces the response bias that can arise when learners’ understanding of a concept shifts during training. Team-level functioning was tracked with the Relational Coordination Survey, administered after each of the six sessions, providing a session-by-session trajectory rather than a single endpoint snapshot.

Relational coordination is a concept borrowed from organizational sociology that describes how work groups coordinate through shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect, communicated through frequent, timely, accurate, and problem-solving exchanges. In health care, high relational coordination has been linked to better patient outcomes and lower staff burnout, but it is rarely measured in educational settings. By collecting RCS data after every session, the Nebraska team could model how coordination developed over time rather than assuming it appeared fully formed. Stroke survivors added a third perspective, completing the Patient Insights and Views Observing Team survey, known as PIVOT, at the midpoint and end of the program—an unusually direct way of asking patients whether the students were actually functioning as a team.

The quantitative findings were consistent across all three instruments. On the ICCAS, students reported statistically significant improvements in every measured domain of interprofessional competency, with p-values below 0.05, spanning areas such as communication, role clarification, patient-centered care, and conflict management. The Relational Coordination Survey told a longitudinal story: linear mixed-effects modeling revealed a significant positive trajectory over the six sessions, with a beta coefficient of 0.06 per session (standard error 0.016, p < 0.001). That may sound like a small number, but in a model of repeated measures it indicates a steady, statistically robust climb in how well team members communicated and trusted one another as the weeks accumulated.

Perhaps the most revealing analysis came when the researchers correlated the two student-facing instruments. Higher relational coordination scores were moderately to strongly associated with higher self-assessed competencies, with correlation coefficients exceeding 0.62 for the domains of communication, patient-centered care, and conflict management. In plain terms, the students whose teams were knitting together socially and communicatively were the same students who felt they were mastering the collaborative skills that educators care about. This convergence suggests that individual competency and team-level coordination are not separate educational outcomes but intertwined processes, each reinforcing the other as a team matures.

Crucially, the patients agreed. Stroke survivors reported significant improvements in team functioning on the PIVOT survey, with a p-value of 0.031, indicating that the gains students and their teams perceived were visible to the people on the receiving end of care. That external validation matters, because self-report measures in education research are often criticized for capturing enthusiasm rather than ability. Here, three independent vantage points—student competency ratings, team communication scores, and patient observations—moved in the same direction.

The qualitative arm of the study filled in the why. Analysis of student focus groups yielded five themes: the value of learning from patient experience, role clarification, relationship-building, the importance of longitudinal engagement, and the feasibility of the tele-team model. Students described how hearing directly from stroke survivors about their daily challenges taught them things no textbook could, and how repeated sessions allowed them to move past the awkwardness of unfamiliar professional roles. The longitudinal structure appears to be doing heavy lifting here—six sessions gave teams time to develop the shared knowledge and mutual respect that relational coordination theory identifies as the foundation of effective collaboration, something a single simulation afternoon cannot supply.

The telehealth delivery model carries implications well beyond stroke rehabilitation education. Rural communities, which the study’s funding from the American Heart Association’s Mission Lifeline Rural Stroke Innovators Grant implicitly acknowledges, often lack access to interprofessional rehabilitation services and to the training pipelines that produce them. A tele-team format lets students from different universities and disciplines participate without travel, and lets patients contribute from their own homes, where the realities of living with stroke are most visible. The authors describe the approach as scalable, and the study’s structure—small teams, scheduled sessions, standardized surveys—lends itself to replication in other regions and other patient populations.

There are, of course, limits to what one study can establish. The sample of thirty-two students is modest, the ICCAS relies on self-assessment even in its retrospective format, and the educational program was evaluated as a quality improvement activity rather than registered as human subjects research, as the University of Nebraska Medical Center Institutional Review Board determined. The authors also note that the version of the article shared ahead of final publication remains subject to editorial completion. Still, the convergent evidence—quantitative trajectories, cross-measure correlations, patient confirmation, and rich qualitative themes—makes a compelling case that the field’s evaluation toolkit should expand. Combining an individual competency measure like the ICCAS with a team-level measure like the RCS, the researchers argue, gives educators a far more complete picture of how collaborative capacity actually develops. If the findings hold up across larger and more diverse cohorts, the humble video call, repeated week after week with a real patient at the center, may prove to be one of the most effective classrooms interprofessional education has ever had.

Subject of Research: Interprofessional education through longitudinal telehealth student teams caring for stroke survivors

Article Title: Improving interprofessional competencies and relational coordination through longitudinal tele-teams: a mixed methods study

Article References: Cochran, T. M., Kennel, V., Beam, E. L., Jensen, L. E., Volkman, K. G., McKelvey, M., & Jensen, G. M. (2026). Improving interprofessional competencies and relational coordination through longitudinal tele-teams: a mixed methods study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10472-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10472-8

Keywords: interprofessional education, telehealth, relational coordination, stroke rehabilitation, health professions education, teamwork, mixed methods, ICCAS, patient-centered care, longitudinal learning, medical education, collaborative practice