Research
How Does the CHIC Scale Help with Research?
The CHIC Scale provides an excellent foundation or companion tool for a variety of research opportunities. Because healthcare can have different levels of collaborative needs and expectations, it can be difficult to make the most of the resources available. The CHIC Scale provides a validated instrument to explore interprofessional dynamics that affect staff performance, patient outcomes, and hospital costs.
In addition to the assessment, there is additional content and ongoing research built around the CHIC Scale. This framework provides a rich source of structure and content that can be easily reconfigured to create momentum quickly or help sustain existing efforts in a variety of healthcare environments. The CHIC Scale framework provides real-world context and timely insights for understanding the essential elements that affect the ability to practice interprofessional collaboration well. Below are a few details for some of the applications related to program development.
Internal Research
Evaluating the collaborative capacity of a single department or an entire organization can yield many valuable insights. The CHIC Scale provides a starting point from which to build new ideas or confirm existing insights. The instrument is simple to use and easy to disseminate. Internal research can provide a significant foundation to better understand the boundaries that define the capacity to collaborate.
Industry Research
Collecting data in multiple healthcare markets is an excellent opportunity to use the CHIC Scale to study how each factor of the scale is affected by various qualities of each area of care. Exploring how specialty organizations like pediatric, surgical, rehabilitation, or behavioral health facilities may be particularly insightful for comparison across their peer groups. Understanding the role of collaboration across healthcare segments may provide valuable lessons to better equip teams in specific situations.
Public Health Research
Solving health problems on a large scale requires funding, research, and interprofessional collaboration. Current public health challenges need a portfolio of solutions, many of which can only be achieved through coordinated efforts from a widely diverse group of healthcare professionals. Studying how public health initiatives are planned, implemented, and sustained has the potential for both immediate and long-term benefits. The CHIC Scale offers significant utility to facilitate this effort.
Academic Research
Rigorous research is a cornerstone of healthcare. The CHIC Scale was born out of a deep dive into the academic literature and governed by the expectation to freely share valuable insights produced from the effort. Great care has been taken to ensure that the CHIC Scale is a reliable instrument that meets a need and is simple to use. The instrument has tremendous potential as a collection of measures as well as a stand-alone tool; however, its value increases when paired with other tools and datasets. The CHIC scale is an active area of research with nearly unlimited opportunities to partner with new and existing efforts to better understand and improve patient care.