Teammate Principle

In a real relay race, the handoff is one of the most practiced moments in the sport.

Same team. Same stadium. Both runners trained together, knowing exactly when to reach forward and when to reach back. They don't stop until they know the baton is secure.

Now imagine something different...

Two teams. Separate stadiums, miles apart. Different training methods, different systems, no shared practice. Coordinating directly is too complex, so they find a workaround: grab someone who has never run track before, put them in the middle, and ask them to somehow connect the handoff between the two teams.

That's absurd. No relay team would run a race that way.

But when a patient moves between two hospitals (e.g., from a surgical center to a rehab facility) that's often exactly what happens.

Two care teams who don’t have rapport. Different systems, cultures, and protocols. And a patient in the middle, stressed and often medicated, asked to act as the communication bridge between them.

That untrained middle runner is the patient.

We don't design it this way intentionally.

It just happens when we treat the handoff as an information problem instead of a teammate problem.

The fix isn't more forms or better software. It's recognizing that the patient isn't the bridge between the teams.

The patient is a teammate.