Health care is fundamental to modern society, but is complex and unsafe (e.g., Vogus, Sutcliffe, & Weick, 2010), with worldwide acknowledgement that health communication failures are the leading cause of error and adverse events in health (Leonard, Graham, & Bonacum, 2004; Ong & Coiera, 2011). Our focus here is to demonstrate how communication accommodation theory (CAT) assists in understanding the underlying causes of ineffective health communication in all contexts, and consider the applied potential for CAT in improving health care education and delivery. We begin with an overview of early research where CAT was invoked to examine health professional and patient interactions (Watson & Gallois, 2007), and then review more recent research in which the CAT health focus has expanded to investigate interspecialty communication between doctors and interprofessional communication more generally. We describe how health professionals communicate and negotiate patient care and how CAT explains how, when and why miscommunication can occur both during traditional dyadic encounters, but also within and between multidisciplinary health care teams. The chapter closes by revisiting the theoretical basis of CAT in health research and suggesting new directions. We will argue that CAT is well positioned to not only explicate the complexity of health care encounters, but to also improve health care through the design and delivery of interventions that move beyond skills based training.