Hacking teamwork in health care: Addressing adverse effects of ad hoc team composition in critical care medicine.

BACKGROUND: The continued need for improved teamwork in all areas of health care is widely recognized. The present article reports on the application of a hackathon to the teamwork problems specifically associated with ad hoc team formation in rapid response teams. PURPOSES: Hackathons-problem-solving events pioneered in computer science-are on the rise in health care management. The focus of these events tends to be on medical technologies, however, with calls for improvements in management practices as general recommendations. The hackathon reported here contributes to health care management practice by addressing improvements in teamwork as the focal problem. METHODOLOGY: The hackathon event took place over 2.5 days in conjunction with an academic conference focused on group research. Three teams comprised of practicing healthcare professionals, academic researchers and students developed solutions to problems of ad hoc team formation in rapid response teams. FINDINGS: The event fulfilled several goals. The teams produced three distinct, yet complementary solutions that were backed by both field-based experience and solid research evidence. The event provided the opportunity for two-way translation of research and practice through direct collaboration among key stakeholders. The hackathon produced long term effects through establishing or strengthening collaborations, dissemination of the ideas through presentations, workshops, and publications, and changes in participantsâ work practices. PRACTICE IMPLICATION: The event demonstrated that hackathons, classically focused on technology, can also offer a spur to innovation around organizational processes. The article provides advice for organizing other hackathons focused on similar topics. The solutions offered by the participants in the event yields the clear insight that multipronged solutions for emergency-oriented teamwork are needed. The hackathon highlighted the scaled of collaboration and effort needed to tackle the many complexities in health care that impact outcomes for providers, patients, and health organizations.

New Frontiers in Analyzing Dynamic Group Interactions: Bridging Social and Computer Science.

This special issue on advancing interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists and social scientists documents the joint results of the international Lorentz workshop, "Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics," which took place in Leiden, The Netherlands, July 2016. An equal number of scholars from social and computer science participated in the workshop and contributed to the papers included in this special issue. In this introduction, we first identify interaction dynamics as the core of group and team models and review how scholars in social and computer science have typically approached behavioral interactions in groups and teams. Next, we identify key challenges for interdisciplinary collaboration between social and computer scientists, and we provide an overview of the different articles in this special issue aimed at addressing these challenges.

Facilitating Teamwork in Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology.

A case of a young adult patient in the days immediately after a cancer diagnosis illustrates the critical importance of three interrelated core coordinating mechanisms-closed-loop communication, shared mental models, and mutual trust-of teamwork in an adolescent and young adult multidisciplinary oncology team. The case illustrates both the opportunities to increase team member coordination and the problems that can occur when coordination breaks down. A model for teamwork is presented, which highlights the relationships among these coordinating mechanisms and demonstrates how balance among them works to optimize team function and patient care. Implications for clinical practice and research suggested by the case are presented.

Facilitating social support: member-leader communication in a breast cancer support group.

BACKGROUND: Early detection and treatment have resulted in more women surviving breast cancer; increased survivorship has also increased the need for breast cancer support groups (BCSG). The ostensible goal of such groups is to provide support for the physical and emotional stressors that cancer survivors face, as well as provide information on coping and treatment options. OBJECTIVE: Although scholars have examined the effects of support groups on their group members, the examination of group facilitator messages has been largely neglected. The goal of this study was to extend theory on group leader behavior, specifically investigating how member-leader messages create social support in support groups. METHODS: The transcribed conversations of weekly meetings of a BCSG were examined using Interaction Process Analysis to discover how the member-leader facilitated the group's enactment and management of social support. RESULTS: Across the meetings, task talk dominated (primarily statements of orientation or information). Furthermore, analysis of interaction sequences between the support group facilitator and other members revealed 2 broad categories of task-oriented facilitation techniques (changing the focus, clarification) and 1 category of socioemotional facilitation techniques (showing support). CONCLUSIONS: Support group facilitators need the ability to facilitate both task and relational aspects of social support. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: Facilitator behaviors were highlighted as being instrumental to the creation of social support. The results from this study indicate that the ability to change the focus of interaction, to provide and require clarification on complex issues, and to show support through relational messages is needed in facilitator training.

Commentary: how can technology help us understand the communication process?

In this commentary, the author reflects on the articles chosen for the special section on communications analysis. These articles problematize communication and raise an interesting set of questions for both human factors and communication scholars to ponder. In the end, both sets of scholars seek the same goal: How do we better examine communication to improve it? Problematizing communication requires scholars to challenge their fundamental assumptions about the phenomenon as well as to tease out the distinctions of methodological approaches typically used by both human factors and communication scholars. Human factors scholars tend to favor forms of communication in which technology or task roles control who can communicate and how. Communication scholars tend to favor contexts in which information flows more freely with fewer explicit restrictions. Creating opportunities to collaborate in research on the communication process may create the best understanding of technology that can better serve our understanding of communication.

Mapping a research agenda for the science of team science.

An increase in cross-disciplinary, collaborative team science initiatives over the last few decades has spurred interest by multiple stakeholder groups in empirical research on scientific teams, giving rise to an emergent field referred to as the science of team science (SciTS). This study employed a collaborative team science concept-mapping evaluation methodology to develop a comprehensive research agenda for the SciTS field. Its integrative mixed-methods approach combined group process with statistical analysis to derive a conceptual framework that identifies research areas of team science and their relative importance to the emerging SciTS field. The findings from this concept-mapping project constitute a lever for moving SciTS forward at theoretical, empirical, and translational levels.

Advancing the science of team science.

The First Annual International Science of Team Science (SciTS) Conference was held in Chicago, IL April 22-24, 2010. This article presents a summary of the Conference proceedings.

Perspective: examining communication as macrocognition in STS.

OBJECTIVE: There are significant points of alignment between a macrocognitive frame of teamwork and a communication perspective. This commentary explores these touch points in regard to use of teams in sociotechnical systems (STS). BACKGROUND: The macrocognitive framework emphasizes a team's shared mental models whereas a communication frame emphasizes that shared meaning among team members is more frequently implicitly than explicitly recorded in their messages. Both acknowledge that communication (in macrocognition) or messages (in communication) serve as an index of team members' goal-directed behavior. The two approaches differ in the role of communication: as information exchange in macrocognition as compared with verbal and nonverbal symbols composing messages for which senders and receivers co-construct meaning. METHOD: This commentary uses relevant literature to explicate the communication position. RESULTS: From a communication perspective, individuals are simultaneously sending and receiving messages, communication is continual and processual, and meaning construction is dependent on relationship awareness and development among communication partners as well as the context. CONCLUSION: The authors posit that meaning cannot be constructed solely from messages, nor can meaning be constructed by one person. Furthermore, sharing information is not the same as communicating. APPLICATION: Architects and users of STS should be interested in designing systems that improve team communication-a goal that is interdependent with understanding how communication fails in the use of such systems. Drilling down to the fundamental properties of communication is essential to understanding how and why meaning is created among team members (and subsequent action).

A multi-level systems perspective for the science of team science.

This Commentary describes recent research progress and professional developments in the study of scientific teamwork, an area of inquiry termed the "science of team science" (SciTS, pronounced "sahyts"). It proposes a systems perspective that incorporates a mixed-methods approach to SciTS that is commensurate with the conceptual, methodological, and translational complexities addressed within the SciTS field. The theoretically grounded and practically useful framework is intended to integrate existing and future lines of SciTS research to facilitate the field's evolution as it addresses key challenges spanning macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis.