Healthcare project management is an incredibly diverse field. To give just a few examples, all these projects could fall under the umbrella of healthcare:
- Hardware companies manufacturing new lines of equipment for healthcare procedures
- Software companies providing systems upgrades for patient records or diagnostics
- Pharmaceutical companies producing a batch of medications or the chemicals used to manufacture them
- Patient-facing organizations aiming to streamline their administrative procedures
- Training programs updating or expanding certifications for healthcare practitioners
Despite the massive differences in what these projects aim to deliver, every healthcare project needs to overcome some similar challenges — and some similar skills to do it well.
In this post, I’ll examine the best ways to tackle the common issues that healthcare projects have to navigate, look at how Wrike’s project management tools square up to those challenges, and show the results Wrike’s users in research, patient care, and pharmaceuticals have seen.
4 challenges in healthcare projects (and how to overcome them)
There are dozens of posts out there that try to apply a standard project management structure to a healthcare project. They speak about how to initiate, plan, execute, and close successfully (covering all the steps you’ll find in Wrike’s in-depth project management guide) and just assume you work in a hospital rather than an office.
But there’s a problem with the assumption that classic project management advice automatically applies to healthcare.
In my experience, healthcare projects face bigger problems with scheduling, resource allocation, communication, and sheer task volume than many others. Plus, the stakes can feel higher in this sector. Even small delays can cost millions of dollars in lost revenue, and a project’s results ultimately affect the quality of care for countless patients.
So, while it’s true that every project manager needs to be a good organizer and communicator, healthcare project managers need these skills in overdrive — and the right tools to support them. With this in mind, here’s your industry-specific guide to navigating the challenges of a healthcare project.
Challenge 1: High task volume
The number of files you need to create and manage during a healthcare project is staggering.
For example, if you’re part of a healthcare hardware company bringing a new MRI machine to market, you’re easily looking at 900 pieces of documentation. This task load can also grow if you target multiple markets because the licensing conditions can vary between, for example, the EU and the U.S.
What’s more, as well as managing paperwork during your project planning and execution, you’ll also need to ensure the documentation is accessible long after the project closes. Because there’s always the chance of a legal challenge in the future, your paperwork and the decision chain need to remain traceable for years to come.
Managing projects with high task volume: Expert insight
Some healthcare companies try to manage their tasks and files in Excel. I’m going to say it upfront: this strategy doesn’t work. There’s far too much to track, the chance of human error is too high, and the task history is simply too important to leave to spreadsheets.
New healthcare managers can (understandably) feel daunted by the sheer number of tasks they face during a project. But it’s helpful to remember that, most of the time, the individual tasks are relatively clear-cut. To return to the MRI example above, you either have the document you need, or you don’t. And your trials have either fulfilled the conditions or they’ve failed. This means the challenge is less about creating the documentation and more about completing it in time to make your approval window.
When you frame your tasks like this, you realize that the main challenge is to get status visibility on every task in the project pipeline and identify the delays that are putting your project at risk. This is why expert healthcare project managers emphasize the importance of project management and task-tracking software, which brings transparency to their workload and timeline and removes the gaps in their process.
Case study: Syneos Health
Syneos Health is an end-to-end biopharmaceutical solutions organization serving healthcare and research customers globally. Wrike helps Syneos manage the process of bringing new therapies to market in over 110 countries, an ongoing task that sees the company issue over 200 new tasks every day.
Syneos previously used an in-house, spreadsheet-based system to track its project progress, but this disjointed process lacked functionality and flexibility. Like any healthcare company, it needed “real-time visibility into project pipelines, detailed status updates, and a unified management system.”
Sherrie Besecker notes how Wrike fulfilled these requirements by giving them full visibility of project timelines. The team members view progress in project dashboards and share status updates that help them collaborate effectively. In turn, the information they gather from tracking their tasks in one shared space informs their operation and process planning, so they can minimize the risks to their timelines and launch their new products on schedule.
Syneos has scaled its Wrike workspaces to manage over 15,000 successful projects, completing 215,000 total tasks.
Challenge 2: Competing interests
Planning a healthcare project means balancing complex — and often contrasting — needs.
For example, when a hospital upgrades the IT system it uses to manage patient records, the project will have to navigate:
- The interests of the hospital, especially in terms of budget
- The needs of the IT service provider, in terms of both revenue and the resources they have to devote to such a large project
- The requirements and preferences of the hospital staff, who will have to adopt the new system while continuing to do their jobs
- The patients, whose care could ultimately be affected by the decisions being made
This balancing act, and the sheer number of people it involves, has a few different outworkings.
First, it means that healthcare projects often feel high-stakes. Even what seems like a small change — like upgrading the systems that manage bookings on a surgical floor — can have huge repercussions if an error is made or there’s extended downtime as the systems are switched.
Second, it can mean that healthcare projects are extremely drawn out. With so many competing interests and the huge costs involved, it can take a long time to reach decisions, approve project plans, and schedule the work that needs to be done.
How to manage competing interests in healthcare projects
To work successfully, healthcare project managers need to liaise with professionals with very different backgrounds.
For example, if you were a hospital manager leading a project that installed new ultrasound machines throughout the building, you’d communicate with:
- The company providing the equipment to answer your questions as you compare options and find the system that best meets your needs
- The installation team that will install the hardware and software, as you negotiate the access they need and the downtime required
- The medical professionals and hospital administrators in several different departments to schedule the installation and training
Excellent communication skills are crucial in this field, and a background in healthcare is a huge bonus. When you have those skills and experience, you’re better able to break the project into phases that suit the different stakeholders you’re managing and keep those stakeholders engaged and enthusiastic throughout a long project.
Change management is also an essential skill to have, and a detailed overview of your project tasks will help you share the right information with the right subteams at the right point in the process.
Case study: Entrust Disability Services
Entrust Disability Services provides private residences for people with disabilities. All its projects balance the needs of the company with continuity of care for its clients.
To manage projects successfully, Entrust wanted software that would streamline its processes and communications and eliminate the need to search through emails to find information about project tasks. When it started using Wrike to manage its communications and project data, it found insights that helped develop its processes and advance the service it provides.
Ryan Nelson, the Controller at Entrust, told us about how his team offloads their daily tasks and mental load into one central platform in Wrike. This means their essential progress and scheduling data is stored securely, while their brainpower is freed up to problem-solve, plan, and “innovate for independence” for their clients.
With the overview they have in Wrike, the team can fulfill their requirements and find new ways to meet their patient’s needs — balancing the two interests on even the most complex projects.
Challenge 3: Scheduling and logistics
I’ve said before that — at least on paper — healthcare projects aren’t inherently more difficult than others. The issues arise when your plan is put into practice, and you have to coordinate real, often incredibly specialized, service providers to meet a narrow window of opportunity, all while minimizing disruption to the services a healthcare client provides.
Scheduling healthcare projects and managing the logistics can be inherently complex, partly because larger projects need to be scheduled as much as 18 months in advance, and partly because an institution like a hospital can’t simply shut down to accommodate your project.
Another key difference between healthcare and other industries is the impact that industry regulations can have on project scheduling. Regulations can change rapidly and vary from state to state, which can make it challenging both to plan new projects and to repeat successful strategies in a new context.
For example, if nurse-patient ratios change while you’re planning a project like the ones we’ve already discussed, your plan could be completely derailed. Not only could it leave you with more personnel to train and more schedules to coordinate, but changes in staffing could also affect the hospital’s bottom line and mean the project you initially planned is no longer feasible.
Overcoming project scheduling challenges in the healthcare sector
Part of overcoming the challenges in healthcare projects is an exhaustive knowledge of your field and the upcoming changes that could affect your scheduled projects. This knowledge can help you identify, plan for, and mitigate risks before they derail your project.
But ultimately, to manage a healthcare project successfully, you’ll need to pivot to stay on track. This is yet another reason why most healthcare project managers would rather use dedicated software to view their projects from multiple angles and stay flexible enough to adapt to changes and keep their work on track.
Case study: Virscio
Virscio uses Wrike as a scalable collaboration hub and a central source of truth, helping to overcome the logistical challenges of pharmaceutical and biotech research.
The managers at Virscio needed to engage the team without becoming bogged down in endless staff meetings.
Rob Goody, the Chief Technology Officer, explained that the science can rapidly change in the context in which the company works. The team found that traditional project management platforms like Basecamp didn’t work for their sector of healthcare, especially as their company scaled up. They needed a platform where they could communicate the latest results of their research — and the research being done elsewhere — and adapt to the new information without stalling their process.
Virscio has saved countless hours since it switched to Wrike by removing meetings from team calendars and automating repetitive tasks. The team has set up Wrike as an “integrated communication hub” with discrete spaces for each project and for the accounting, equipment, and business development teams, which also need an overview of their latest research updates.
Logistically, Wrike also helped Virscio’s employees who have to travel to sites for work. With the mobile app, they can stay on top of changes and manage the new information to avoid negative impacts on their scheduling.
Challenge 4: Data protection
Data protection regulations in healthcare are stringent, so managing any healthcare project involves having watertight systems in place to protect confidential information from your clients and their patients.
To succeed here, managers need an in-depth understanding of the data protection regulations that apply in all the markets they serve. For example, suppose you’re part of a pharmaceutical company that operates on both sides of the Atlantic. In that case, you’ll need an expert understanding of what both HIPAA and GDPR mean for the way you collect and store data from clinical and non-clinical trials.
It also means choosing your project management tools extremely carefully. You’ll need to ensure the platform you use complies with the regulations you’re subject to, and that you have the right level of control over stakeholders and team members who can access your project’s sensitive data.
Managing healthcare projects with Wrike: Your guide
Wrike is a complete, HIPAA-compliant work management platform that can simplify and accelerate the way you deliver your healthcare projects. Over 20,000 companies worldwide use Wrike, many of them in diverse healthcare sectors. From manufacturing to patient care, let’s examine the features these companies rely on.
Wrike gives you complete visibility into your project pipelines and the granular detail you need to spot risks to your project’s success. Plus, as a horizontal platform, it’s easy to expand Wrike to help the different teams within your organization collaborate and deliver successful projects.
Centralize your project management, no matter the scale
Wrike’s project management system is completely scalable. Even if it’s going to take hundreds of subtasks to see your project to completion, Wrike gives you total visibility into your task volume, timeline, and progress toward your deadline.
The beauty of Wrike for healthcare projects is that it acts as a single source of truth, no matter how much you scale up. Our spaces and folder system give you the scope you need to store — and then locate — every task in your project. And with the custom item type feature, you can create tasks and subtasks that reflect the work that needs to be done, rather than tracking every step in your project through a generic workflow.
![gif of wrike custom item types](https://www.wrike.com/blog/content/uploads/2024/06/OUTPUT_1x.gif)
Wrike’s project dashboards, where you can view all your tasks and their status, are displayed in real time. Whenever a task changes status, that change is reflected across your workspace. This helps you to quickly pick up unassigned tasks, jump straight to approvals when a task is almost complete, and quickly identify bottlenecks as they start to develop.
Best of all, when you add your tasks and track them through Wrike, you’ll gather valuable insights into your process. By filtering the data in your project space, you can create reports quickly and easily, and then use these reports as a jumping-off point to drill down and discover exactly the pieces of regulation, information silos, or communication delays that might threaten to derail your project.
With this detailed, comprehensive overview of your project work, you can stay up to date on your progress, prioritize your tasks, and make informed decisions about resource allocation to keep your project on track.
Document your decision-making process
Wrike brings an element of traceability to your project work that’s impossible to get with spreadsheets and emails.
When you work in Wrike, every task you track is a record of your process. Your task cards include information on when a task was created, started, assigned, or reassigned. You can view the comments and discussions that took place, check the attached files, and ultimately see who was accountable for the work.
Schedule your projects to mitigate risks
When you schedule your projects in Wrike, you draw on up-to-date information about your current projects, as well as information about how you’ve completed your tasks in the past. This helps you make informed decisions about your project scheduling. This can be critically important in healthcare, where a deadline missed by a week can result in an entire quarter of missed revenue.
So, as well as features to set your project schedule (and visualize it from different angles), Wrike also includes the features you need to keep your project on track if the schedule starts to slip.
- Automated, dynamic visualizations: When a task changes status or a due date changes in your Kanban board or Gantt chart, your timeline will be updated automatically to reflect it, so you can see if you’re still on track.
- Detailed risk reports: Wrike’s risk management tools alert you to emerging or critical risks to your project outcomes, so you can quickly assess the root cause and reallocate resources before your project is derailed.
- Personalized dashboards: Team members can view their upcoming deadlines at a glance, effectively prioritize their work, and keep on track to achieve project goals.
Work with custom permissions and enterprise-level security
When you set up your Wrike workspace, you have pinpoint control over permissions and access.
Choose from four access roles — Full, Editor, Limited, or Read Only — and adjust the roles for everyone who has access to your workspace. These roles change a user’s ability to create, edit, or view projects and tasks. With an Enterprise account, you can customize your access roles.
Beyond your own personal workspace, Wrike is GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA certified — the industry standards in data privacy for healthcare and beyond.
We’re dedicated to making Wrike the most secure and reliable collaborative work platform on the market. Your data is encrypted and continually backed up, and we review our policies on an ongoing basis in light of the latest technological and regulatory requirements.
Read Wrike’s security overview here.
Use templates to manage complex, phased projects with ease
The beginning of a new healthcare project can be daunting, and delays in getting your system up and running can have a knock-on effect as you scramble to catch up. When you manage your projects with Wrike, you can streamline the initiation phase, and set up your workspace with every tool you need.
For complex, multiphase healthcare projects, try using these templates as your starting point:
- Complex project with phases: This template gives you a solid framework for long-term, large-scale projects. The template workspace consolidates your project management, replacing scattered tools like emails and spreadsheets to close the gaps in your process and project overview.
- Communication plan: Keep stakeholders updated and aligned as your project unfolds. This template helps you outline a communications schedule that suits each stakeholder and updates them regularly, minimizing miscommunication and ensuring different stakeholders feel heard throughout the process.
- Adaptive project management: This template helps you embrace flexibility and promote collaboration with all stakeholders. Use the real-time, 360-degree views you need to adapt to shifting timelines. It’s also compatible with differing project management styles, including Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid.
- Project risk analysis: Proactively gauge, classify, communicate, and mitigate risks before they impact your project outcomes. This template gives greater visibility into risks and their severity with prebuilt RAID entry forms, removing information silos and providing more information to your teams as a deadline approaches.
For complex, high-stakes healthcare projects, choose Wrike
Realistically, there’s no viable way to manage a modern healthcare project without using software to track your tasks, schedule your work, allocate resources, and manage risk. So, when you’re comparing options for your team, consider Wrike’s scalability, customization, and unbeatable reporting features — and the ways they can streamline your projects and increase your chance of success.
Find out more about how Wrike can work for your unique healthcare project.