October 2026

What If Our Doctors Really Talked to Each Other?

October 2, 2026   |   Charles Schelle

In the age of digital records, patients can find themselves repeating the same medical history to their different health care providers.

You have a primary care doctor, maybe a specialist or two, a pharmacist, and other health professionals involved in your care.

But when something changes, you may still find yourself repeating the same medical history, explaining what another doctor told you, or wondering whether anyone has actually talked to anyone else.

Kenneth H. Wong, PhD, works at the intersection of graduate education and the health professions at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). He is UMB’s vice provost for graduate education and dean of the University of Maryland School of Graduate Studies, which works across disciplines and professional schools to prepare students for increasingly collaborative careers.

UMB is trying to address part of this problem before its graduates enter the workforce by creating opportunities for future health and human-services professionals to learn how to communicate, understand one another’s roles, and solve problems together.

So why does health care become so disconnected? Why are health professionals still trained so separately? And can changing the way we educate them help patients experience one team instead of several different providers?

On a new episode of “The UMB Pulse,” we ask: Why don’t your doctors talk to each other?

Listen to new episodes of “The UMB Pulse” wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.

Read an excerpt of the conversation below or watch the entire interview above.

Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

1. Why does it sometimes feel like your doctors aren’t talking to each other?

Kenneth Wong: “I think the main reason is that often they aren’t. … When I think about it, it’s really the systems that are in place. It’s not that people don’t want to collaborate or that people don’t want to cooperate on things that are important, but a lot of the systems and a lot of the structures that are underpinning how we do health care, they discourage that.

“If you think about working on your house, you get a general contractor because you have a bunch of specialists who do their own thing, and you need somebody to coordinate that. And one of the interesting things we see in health care is that coordinator role doesn’t exist in the same way as it does in other industries.”

2. What can go wrong when health professionals don’t communicate with one another?

Wong: “You certainly see impacts on things like error rates, people having to spend time ordering tests that they may not have needed. I’ve certainly had that experience in my own health care where I went in for something and there was a test that I was supposed to do, and I said, ‘I already did this test.’

“There was a lot of back and forth and trying to figure out, do we have records for that and where do we get them from? … No one likes to be providing the same information over and over again, and then you worry about, did I answer it consistently, and is my information going to be accurate if I have to keep repeating it over and over again? Human error creeps into that situation.”

3. Why are doctors, nurses, pharmacists, social workers, dentists and other health professionals still educated separately if they eventually need to work together?

Wong: “I think a lot of that is historic, and a lot of that has to do with the professional identity that our many different professions have.

“If you think about how almost anyone is trained, they’re typically trained by people who are experts in that field. And so they tend to bring with that expertise a particular culture or a particular viewpoint on how things are done. … That’s very good in some ways because it allows specialization, it allows people to really go deep into knowledge, but it does make it challenging to work across disciplines.

“And that’s where I think an institution like UMB has a really good program or a set of programs where we are intentionally forcing people together. … There is a natural tendency to specialize. There’s a natural tendency to work in your silos or your areas that you are most comfortable in, and there has to be some active force that is creating a different modality of instruction.”

4. What is UMB doing differently to teach future health professionals to work together before they enter practice?

Wong: “We have a number of programs that are specifically interprofessional. We have an Interprofessional Education Day … where they’re bringing providers and simulated patients. So we have someone who is an actor who is coming in pretending to be a patient, and then the students from different professions are all in the room listening to this person talk about their health challenges.

“They’re offering suggestions from their perspective, but also hearing what others are providing. And then I think one of the really important things is they have the ability to discuss with each other what their perspective is on this case and how they might approach it in an integrated way. Because for some of the students, it will be the first time that they’re interacting with people from other specialty professions within the university.”

5. Does training health professions students together actually change how they work once they enter the health care system?

Wong: “There is certainly literature in the academic world about this where people have looked at students and their practice later on, and they see a fairly strong effect of people wanting to be able to work together with other professions, of being more comfortable with working together with other professions.

“One of the conclusions is that people want to work together, but they sometimes find themselves working against systems that are designed for separateness or designed to be independent. And so they are excited as people to be working across professions, but they may find it hard to actually make that happen once they get out into the world where they’re practicing.”

For more episodes of The UMB Pulse, visit umaryland.edu/pulse.