HCS 131 Week 4 Teamwork and Collaboration Example

Five Behaviors, Three Habits and One Hybrid Team: Improving Collaboration in a Health System's Prior Authorization Unit

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

HCS/131: Business Communications Skills for Health Care Professionals

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The health system, the unit and its figures are composites written for a model paper.

The prior authorization unit of a regional health system obtains insurer approval before scheduled imaging, procedures and specialty drugs. Its 14 staff include a supervisor, 11 authorization specialists and two clerks; seven work from home. Each day they receive about 260 requests. When one large insurer changed its approval rules in the spring, the backlog doubled within a month, and patients' MRI and infusion dates were pushed back. The supervisor asked why a capable team was falling behind. This paper uses a model of teamwork to answer that question and describes what the unit changed.

A Model for Diagnosis

Salas et al. (2005) reviewed decades of team research and proposed five core components of teamwork: leadership of the team, monitoring one another's performance, backing each other up, adapting to change and orientation toward the team over the individual. They argued that three coordinating mechanisms make those components possible: shared mental models, mutual trust and closed-loop communication. The model works well as a checklist because each component describes observable behavior.

Team Leadership

The supervisor was skilled and respected but spent most of her day working the hardest requests herself. She rarely set priorities for the whole team or explained the insurer's new rules. Leadership in the model means coordinating and giving direction, not only doing the most difficult work.

Mutual Performance Monitoring

Specialists could not see one another's queues. An on-site specialist might finish early while a remote colleague was buried in requests for the changed insurer, and no one knew. Without visibility, members could not notice when a teammate needed help.

Backup Behavior

Because no one could see overloaded queues, no one offered help. Remote staff said they felt uncomfortable asking for it in the group chat, which was mostly used for jokes and schedule swaps.

Adaptability

When the insurer changed its rules, each specialist figured out the new requirements alone. Some learned quickly, others kept submitting requests the old way and receiving denials, which added resubmissions to the backlog.

Team Orientation

Morale was good and people liked one another. Team orientation, a preference for working as a team rather than alone, was the unit's strength.

Why the Gaps Appeared

The coordinating mechanisms explain the gaps. There was no shared mental model of the new rules, because no one had summarized them for everyone. Mutual trust was high in person but weaker with remote staff, who rarely spoke with on-site colleagues. Most importantly, closed-loop communication was missing: when a specialist asked a question in the chat, no one confirmed that it had been answered, so questions disappeared and the same mistakes repeated.

Three Habits From TeamSTEPPS

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (n.d.) developed TeamSTEPPS to teach teamwork skills in health care. Although it was designed for clinical teams, three of its tools fit an administrative unit. A brief is a short planning discussion at the start of work. The unit now holds a 10-minute video brief at 8:00 a.m., where the supervisor states the day's priorities and any rule changes. A huddle is a quick meeting to reassess during the day; the unit holds one at 1:00 p.m. to rebalance queues. A check-back is closed-loop communication: the sender states the message, the receiver repeats it, and the sender confirms. Rule clarifications now follow this pattern in the chat, ending with a thumbs-up only after the receiver restates the rule.

Norms for Hybrid Work

Dhawan and Chamorro-Premuzic (2018) recommend that remote teams agree explicitly on how and when they communicate. The unit made three agreements: questions about requests go in a dedicated channel separate from social chat, any question gets a reply within 30 minutes, and each queue's count is visible on a shared dashboard that everyone can see. On Fridays, one on-site and one remote specialist pair up to review the week's denials together.

A Shared Mental Model

The supervisor wrote a one-page summary of the insurer's new rules with examples of approved and denied requests, reviewed it in the brief and updated it whenever a new denial revealed a gap.

Results After Six Weeks

The backlog fell from about 600 requests to 180. Median turnaround from request to decision dropped from six business days to three. Denials for the changed insurer fell by roughly half. In a short survey, remote specialists said they felt more connected to the team.

Leadership Changes

The supervisor made one change in her own work that mattered as much as any tool. She stopped taking the hardest requests herself and instead assigned them in the morning brief to specialists with the right experience, then checked on them at the huddle. That freed about two hours of her day for coaching, answering rule questions and watching the dashboard. Specialists said they preferred a supervisor who could see the whole board to one who was buried in a single queue, and two newer specialists said they learned the insurer's rules faster because the supervisor now had time to review their denials with them.

Why Remote Staff Needed More Than Tools

The dashboard and channel rules helped, but remote specialists also needed to be known as people. The Friday pairing gave each remote specialist regular contact with an on-site colleague, and the supervisor began ending each brief by asking one person, in rotation, to share a small win from the day before. Trust built across locations is slower than trust built in a shared office, and small, repeated contact is what builds it.

Lessons for Other Teams

Good relationships are not enough; teams also need visible work, shared understanding and loops that close. Short, structured contact helped more than long meetings would have.

Conclusion

The prior authorization unit had strong team orientation but weak leadership direction, monitoring, backup and adaptability, rooted in missing shared knowledge and open communication loops. A model of teamwork found the gaps, TeamSTEPPS tools and hybrid norms closed them, and turnaround time showed the difference.

References

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. (n.d.). TeamSTEPPS. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.ahrq.gov/teamstepps-program/index.html

Dhawan, E., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2018). How to collaborate effectively if your team is remote. Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2-5.

Salas, E., Sims, D. E., & Burke, C. S. (2005). Is there a "Big Five" in teamwork? Small Group Research, 36(5), 555-599. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496405277134