Health professions institutions design their curricula to be integrated either vertically, with clinical relevance over time, and/or horizontally between disciplines within one course. It’s easier for health professions educators to integrate vertically by using relevant clinical examples. In contrast, it can be more challenging for educators to integrate disciplines horizontally to create interdisciplinary sessions that are co-taught by discipline experts. Therefore, despite the known benefits of integration in health professions education, it leads to disciplines being taught discretely in separate lectures. We developed the SHIFT (Session-level Horizontal Integration Fit for Teaching) Conceptual Framework as a practical guide for health professions educators interested in creating interdisciplinary sessions to be co-taught synchronously. It is a framework for foundational health professions educators to integrate their disciplines of expertise collaboratively and horizontally at the level of a single lecture or a small group of lectures on a particular topic. SHIFT is a four-phase framework with objective statements within each phase for educators to follow. We created the framework based on our session, “Acid-Base Disorders,” where we integrated physiology and biochemistry disciplines for two asynchronous lectures and a team-based learning module.  

In this focus session, presenters would spend the first 15 minutes introducing the SHIFT framework to attendees. The remaining 75 minutes would be dedicated to small group interactions based on each phase of the framework with intermittent report-outs. Within their small groups, attendees will explore ideas utilizing the framework and discover potential opportunities for collaborative integration at their home institutions. We expect participants to use SHIFT to streamline the process of integrating important health sciences topics, as well as identify possible benefits and challenges of integration.