Ashley Crew, MD: The Relationship Between Healthcare Specialists

The more healthcare workers can collaborate with each other, the better care they can give to patients. That’s because every patient has distinct features and do not fit into individual boxes.

“With my rheumatology colleagues I find communication is the biggest thing,” Ashley Crew, MD, of Keck Medicine of USC, said in a recent interview with HCPLive®.

Rheumatologists and dermatologists often work together to make the best treatment decision. Crew has a multidisciplinary clinic where she and a rheumatologist see a patient synchronously. They work together and there is the benefit of having the same history and assessment and the providers can talk in and out of the room to come up with a treatment decision.

Other times, however, practice does not look like that, she said. Most of the time she shares patients with providers who are either in the same facility or a completely different setting in a different part of her city.

“I think no matter what, as long as we’re communicating with each other, then we can really be beneficial to each other and again help for diagnostic purposes and also for therapeutic interventions and how we can better maximize them,” Crew concluded.