What makes project management in healthcare tricky, and how do you solve it?

When you think of healthcare, the first image that likely comes to mind is a doctor treating a patient. But behind every successful treatment lies a complex network of operations working tirelessly to ensure patients receive the best possible care.

Consider this:

• Collaboration between departments like billing and insurance to create a seamless patient experience
• Implementing tools and technologies to track patient data and inquiries
• Ensuring strict compliance with healthcare regulations such as HIPAA or OSHA
• Procuring and managing critical medical supplies
• Preparing for emergencies and responding effectively

All of this requires more than just effort—it demands excellent project management. Behind-the-scenes teams must juggle multiple responsibilities while coordinating across departments like billing, administration, procurement, and more.
This is where project management in healthcare comes into play. If you’re navigating the challenges of managing healthcare projects—whether it’s implementing new systems, improving workflows, or enhancing patient engagement—this guide is for you. We’ll explore best practices in project management that will help you stay organized, meet deadlines, and deliver exceptional results in this critical sector.

What is project management in healthcare?

Project management in healthcare refers to the systematic planning, organizing, and overseeing of resources, tasks, and timelines to achieve specific goals. Unlike project management in other industries, healthcare projects often involve outcomes that directly impact patient care, safety, and well-being.

These projects can include implementing new technologies – such as electronic health records (EHR) systems – streamlining administrative workflows, launching new clinical services, or ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. These initiatives are complex and require collaboration across cross-functional teams like medical professionals, administrators and IT staff.

Note: It’s important to remember that doing project management in the healthcare sector doesn’t require clinical experience or expertise. As long you have expertise implementing IT solutions, you can excel in a behind-the-scenes role where you enable other teams to work more efficiently. Here’s a project manager from a healthcare sector explaining what it’s like to work in such a role.

Now that we understand what healthcare project management entails, let’s take a look at why it’s important. 

Why is project management in healthcare critical?

The healthcare industry has many moving parts— from patient care, medical technologies, and compliance regulations to administrative tasks, staffing, and inter-department communication. It’s something most project managers in the healthcare sector agree with.

Due to this, even seemingly simple tasks, like responding promptly to patient or vendor queries, can become overwhelming, especially if you don’t have proper systems in place. 

That’s why effective project management is essential. It introduces structure and accountability to ensure that even the most routine tasks, like assigning queries to the right team member, are streamlined.

However, to create a framework that works for your organization, you must anticipate the challenges and prepare as much as possible. Let’s look at some challenges you might face in this role.

Challenges in healthcare project management

Working as a project manager in healthcare is a high-pressure job, and it comes with a fair 

share of challenges.

1. Ensuring all stakeholders are aligned

With so many stakeholders involved—doctors, nurses, administrators, IT staff, and vendors—it can be challenging to keep everyone on the same page. Whether it’s a follow-up on test results or appointment scheduling, misalignment can cause issues. It can lead to conflicting priorities, delayed decisions, and inefficiencies. 

For example, doctors, nurses, administrators, and vendors are all involved in scheduling surgeries in a clinic. If the doctor schedules a surgery but the administrator doesn’t update the operating room availability, the surgery could be delayed because the room wasn’t reserved. 

1. Managing vendor and supplier communication

Vendor relationships are the cornerstone of smooth healthcare operations. Healthcare organizations rely on vendors for critical supplies like medical equipment, medications, etc. A delayed response to a vendor inquiry, such as approving an order or requesting maintenance, can disrupt operations.

For example, failing to confirm an order for vaccines or medical devices could delay essential treatments or lead to shortages in crucial supplies. This can also result in last-minute procurement efforts that incur higher costs and reduce the availability of supplies when needed most.

3. Managing appointment backlogs and missed deadlines

In healthcare, timely appointments are critical for providing quality care. However, managing appointment backlogs is often an issue due to high patient volumes, limited staff resources, and unexpected emergencies. 

Let’s say a clinic that handles cancer cases is seeing a sudden referral surge. Due to this, appointment requests pile up. As a result, a patient with early-stage symptoms of a serious illness is given an appointment three weeks later. This delay not only prolongs the patient’s anxiety but also risks the progression of the illness. 

4. Resource management and compliance issues

This involves knowing how to allocate resources – staff, medical equipment, and budgets. Doing this right is often challenging due to the high demand for services during peak times.

For example, during flu season or a public health crisis, hospitals may experience surges in patient volume that strain their existing staff and facilities. If resources are not allocated efficiently, it can lead to longer wait times for patients, increased stress on healthcare providers, and compromised quality of care.

Another critical challenge in healthcare project management is compliance with regulations. Healthcare project managers must adhere to federal, state, and local regulations and industry standards for patient safety and data privacy (such as HIPAA). Non-compliance can result in severe penalties, including fines and damage to the organization’s reputation.

Even though project management in healthcare is tough, it can be equally rewarding if you have the right tools and processes. Below, we discuss a few you can implement:

5 Tips to master project management in healthcare organizations

1. Setting clear objectives and timelines

Remember that every project, whether that’s improving infrastructure or compliance, ultimately impacts patient care. So, you must keep patient outcomes at the core and have clear and measurable goals. One way to do that is by aligning your healthcare initiatives with specific patient-centered objectives. 

For instance, if you’re implementing new email management software to streamline communication, set goals like reducing response times to patient inquiries by 20% within three months or ensuring that 95% of emails are addressed on the same day they are received. 

An effective strategy that can help set clear objectives is defining Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). They keep your team accountable for what needs to be done and when it needs to be done. For instance, an SLA can be something like responding to high-priority patient emails within one hour. Whenever an SLA is breached – say, an email query isn’t answered within the set timeframe – the manager gets immediately notified.

2. Centralizing communication

When communication is scattered across individual inboxes, keeping track of work can become challenging. How do you ensure timely follow-ups or assign responsibility when you don’t have visibility into who is working on what?

This is where a shared inbox can help. It’s an inbox that ensures all patient queries are centralized in one place, making it easier to access, track and respond to communication. It also boosts collaboration as team members can loop in their colleagues on specific tasks for inputs.

If you’re planning to setup a shared inbox like this, consider Hiver. It turns your work inbox into a centralized workspace for managing all incoming queries and requests. 

Here’s what you can do with Hiver:

• Assign tasks easily: You can assign queries to team members based on their expertise or context of the communication. 
• Collaborate without forwarding emails: Whenever you need help from another team member, for example, finance or operations, you can @mention them and leave internal notes without forwarding messages.
• Track progress seamlessly: With statuses like “Open,” “In Progress,” and “Closed,” you’ll always know the state of each task..
• Work on shared draft: You can also collaborate on email drafts in real time. This ensures that responses are properly reviewed before they’re sent to patients. 

Case in point:  New Hope Fertility Center found it difficult to respond to their patients in a timely manner. They switched to Hiver, and things changed. Today, they’re able to respond to queries 30% faster because all patient communication is streamlined and centralized.

3. Leverage analytics to track performance and improve processes

As a PM in healthcare, it’s essential to measure your team’s performance and stay on top of any bottlenecks. That’s where reporting and analytics can provide actionable insights.

They help you spot trends, track progress, and identify areas for improvement. For example, you can find out how quickly you’re responding to patients and further drill down into what can be done to improve the time taken for the same.

List of important metrics you can track includes: 

• First response time
• Average resolution time
• Patient Satisfaction 
• The volume of patient queries

Most helpdesks can track these metrics. Hiver, for instance, goes one step further and lets you create custom reports. For instance, you can find the response time for queries tagged as ‘priority’ and compare the monthly numbers.

Did you know? Did you know? Using Hiver, Cohere Health was able to improve patient care access by 70% and reduce denial rates by 60%. They leveraged Hiver’s analytics dashboard to identify key trends and improve communication between healthcare providers and insurers. 

4. Use automated workflows to save time

The key to doing project management in healthcare right is automating repetitive work. And oh, there’s a lot of it. For example, scheduling, rescheduling, and cancelling appointments, sending out test results, and surveying patients after a consultation.

Automating these tasks reduces the time spent on repetitive work and ensures faster, more accurate responses. Hiver can help you set automated workflows for a large volume of mundane tasks like:

• Routing emails to the right team members: You can automatically assign incoming patient queries to the appropriate department or staff member based on predefined rules – the trigger can be usage of specific keywords or the sender name and email ID.

• Sending acknowledgment emails: Auto-send acknowledgment emails to patients when they submit queries. This helps reassure them that their concerns are being addressed. 
• Auto tag queries based on their nature: Bucket incoming communication based on its content. For instance, if a patient mentions the word ‘urgent’ in the email body, it can be tagged as ‘priority’.  

Recommended Reading:How to Provide Outstanding Customer Service in Healthcare

5. Collect and analyze feedback

In healthcare, gathering feedback from stakeholders helps identify hidden issues. For example, your reports might show that appointment scheduling is running smoothly, but patient feedback could reveal they find the process confusing or too time-consuming.

That’s where surveys come into the picture. Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys can help you collect detailed feedback from patients, vendors, and other stakeholders. Using Hiver, you can automatically send CSAT surveys after every patient interaction. You can also control which emails should include surveys and which should not or allow team members to add surveys to specific emails.

Pro Tip: In addition to the best practices discussed above, the subreddit below lists the most critical elements to being successful as a healthcare PM, especially if you’re in a leadership role. 

Leverage the right tool to master healthcare project management.

Project management in healthcare presents a unique challenge – balancing high-quality patient care with operational efficiency. 

You want work to happen as smoothly as possible behind the scenes so that patients get world-class service. And for that, you need the right tools and processes in place.

We’ve discussed some of these in this guide. What’s important is that you implement tools that are easy to use for teams across the organization. This makes it easier to access data, respond to queries on time, and gain insights into process bottlenecks. 

One such tool is Hiver, which I’ve mentioned several times in this article. To find out how exactly Hiver can fit into a healthcare setting, check out this interactive tour.