Thinking Outside the Inbox: Use of Slack in Clinical Groups as a Collaborative Team Communication Platform

[para. 1]: "Academic faculty commonly collaborate across organizations located in multiple time zones, rendering in-person communication impractical. Furthermore, local access to content experts may be limited at many institutions, and multiple competing commitments may preclude attendance at relevant networking events. This is especially true during public health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has accelerated the incorporation of digital alternatives into workflow. Therefore, it is important for teams to develop easily accessible, reliable, and cloud-based collaborative tools to facilitate communication. Although e-mail remains a viable option for short, intermittent communications, the time spent reading and responding to e-mails among larger teams discussing disparate topics may impair productivity. E-mail creates multiple synchronous discussions, making it difficult for individual team members to follow and distinguish topics or projects. At academic medical centers, high volumes of e-mails risk effective team communication due to important e-mails being overlooked or inadvertently deleted."