The Patient as a Project: Optimizing Your Healthcare Experience

Elvina Jeffers is a Director of IT PM/PMO in Louisiana. Project Management is her passion, and she loves sharing her experience and expertise as well as learning from others every day. Healthcare is her vocation, and she gets her energy knowing what she does makes a difference for the patient.

  Healthcare  

As healthcare project managers, we often manage projects that directly impact patients and the quality of their care. Fortunately, project management skills can also be applied to improve the quality of care when you or your loved ones are a patient. Like projects, all patients are unique--their episode of care has a beginning and ending, and there is a result or outcome (hopefully a good one).

Below are factors to consider when managing the patient as a project:

1. Define the scope: Healthcare moves fast, and clinical folks are action oriented. They quickly move to execution, sometimes with poorly defined scope and limited requirements gathering.

To ensure the clinical team has the necessary information, keep a robust list of symptoms and observations to share. For hospital stays or office visits, create a simple scope statement that is communicated when needed. In the hospital, I often make a sign or poster and hang it in a visible location in the patient’s room. For example, “This is John Doe, he is here for a possible recurrent UTI and we are concerned about antibiotic resistance.”

2. Communications: Communicate, communicate, communicate. Don’t think because you told the first three doctors or nurses what is going on that they can remember key details. Determine your communications plan and messaging around symptoms and scope, and …

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