Rx: PM, Post-its and Agile

Janis is an award-winning journalist and editor who has covered many industries beyond project management, including health care, financial services, higher education and retail sales.

  Agile   Communications Management   Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

A hospital’s yearlong initiative to improve care coordination for underserved patients is benefiting from a dose of project management that brings structure, organization and accountability. Simple, strategic Post-it notes and iterative approaches are part of the prescription. It’s all new medicine for the doctors leading the effort.

It’s a common lament among physicians. Portland, Ore.-based internists Honora Englander, M.D., and Devan Kansagara, M.D., say that their medical school training did not include much in the way of business or management education.

But earlier this year, part of that gap was remedied when they took an Oregon Health and Science University graduate level course on clinical research management that introduced a variety of project management principles and techniques. Both doctors are now using their project management knowledge to help fill a critical gap of another kind — the gap in health care services for medically underserved patients. In November, OHSU launched Care Transitions Innovation, a yearlong project to coordinate services for 200 uninsured or Medicaid patients post discharge from the hospital.

Englander is the medical director of Care Transitions Innovation, which is known as C-TraIn, and an assistant professor of medicine at OHSU. Kansagara is the co-principal investigator for C-TraIn, an assistant professor of …

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