In 2016, the National Academies of Practice, or NAP, declared April National Interprofessional Health Care Month at its Forum in Baltimore. NAP’s current public materials commonly use National Interprofessional Healthcare Month. The observance recognizes that complex health needs draw on the knowledge and skill of many professions, and that coordination, safety, effectiveness, and quality depend on how those professions work together.

For 2026, NAP is using #IPHCMonth and inviting awareness activities across healthcare delivery, education, research, and policy. It did not announce a formal theme. The focus of this executive brief, “Make collaboration a reliable operating system, not an individual preference,” is editorial. It translates the observance into a leadership question: can the organization produce coordinated work even when the usual relationship, memory, or workaround is absent?

Multiple disciplines appearing in the same record does not by itself create interprofessional practice. The person receiving care needs a shared goal, understandable roles, one visible plan, a safe way to raise concerns, and clear accountability when work crosses professional or organizational boundaries. Those are design conditions. Leaders can define them, resource them, observe them, and improve them.

A useful system route begins with what matters to the person and ends only when the team knows whether the plan worked. It should cross inpatient, ambulatory, behavioral health, pharmacy, rehabilitation, social care, public health, home, and community settings without forcing the patient or caregiver to become the only integrator.

Start by naming the active team for this episode or goal. That team may change over time. Define who is accountable for the overall plan, which decisions require another professional’s expertise, how disagreement is resolved, and who confirms that the person understands what happens next. Make this information visible in the workflow, not buried in policy.

The loop below is an editorial operating model, not an official NAP or IPEC requirement. Its purpose is to make collaboration observable and repeatable.

Attendance at training is not evidence that team behavior changed. AHRQ’s TeamSTEPPS measurement guidance distinguishes reactions and learning from behavior, processes, and outcomes. Leaders should combine direct observation with existing operational and patient experience data, then tie the measures to a defined care problem.

Choose a small set of measures that reveal whether shared work is happening. Segment results by unit, setting, shift, profession, language, race and ethnicity, disability, payer, and transition type where data quality and privacy permit. The purpose is not to rank professions. It is to locate conditions where the system makes coordinated care hard.

AHRQ defines a handoff as a standardized transfer of information together with authority and responsibility. That distinction matters. A note in the electronic record is not a completed handoff if the receiver does not know responsibility has shifted, cannot ask questions, or does not understand the contingency plan.

Interprofessional handoffs should preserve the person’s goal across professional languages and care settings. They should identify what is known, what remains uncertain, how the person responded, which action is due next, what could change the plan, and who owns each decision. When a patient or caregiver is expected to carry information between teams, provide understandable instructions and a reachable contact. Do not treat them as a substitute for team-to-team communication.

The executive scorecard should test whether policies, technology, staffing, and governance enable shared work. It should not ask individual clinicians to compensate indefinitely for incompatible schedules, fragmented records, unclear privileges, inaccessible communication, or incentives that reward isolated activity.

Review the scorecard with patient and family partners and with professions that are often consulted late. Include pharmacy, rehabilitation, social work, behavioral health, community health, language access, and care management as the care model requires. Different expertise should shape the question before a metric becomes a target.

Do not launch collaboration as a broad cultural aspiration. Choose one problem with visible harm or friction, such as medication reconciliation after discharge, behavioral health follow-up, perioperative readiness, a rehabilitation transition, delayed consult closure, or a complex primary care referral. Build a small interprofessional change team that includes the people who perform the work and the people who receive it.