STUDENT PAPER

Value of Project Management in Health Care Research

By Rosemary Makar, MD

USA

The purpose of health care research (HCR), whether basic science or clinical, is to advance our knowledge about health care and ultimately provide better patient care. Therefore it is important that HCR is conducted in a timely manner, and at the same time, in an accurate and organized way.

A HCR project team consists of the principal investigator (PI) and various team members, including technologists, nurses, statisticians, medical residents, clerks, etc, depending on the needs of the project. Including a project manager would add tremendous value to a HCR project team. The concept of including a project manager in HCR teams is a relatively new idea compared to its value in business and technology (2, 5).

I decided to do my health care research essay on this topic because I have been involved in research projects in the past but had never consciously applied project management (PM) tools or techniques. I was surprised to learn there is a lot of information available about this topic and that PM has recently become an important aspect of both basic science and health care research (2, 5, 12, 14, 16, and 17).

I also learned that in HCR, a term often used to discuss PM is “team science”. Team science is defined as: “the interdiscipline of the Science that promotes team-based research by empirically examining processes by which research teams organize, communicate, and conduct research. This includes understanding how teams connect and collaborate to achieve scientific breakthroughs that would not be attainable by either individual or additive efforts.” (12). Stokols describes team science as the “branch of science studies concerned especially with understanding and managing circumstances that facilitate or hinder team science initiatives” (5). In other words, team science is just another term for project management, but probably one that is more acceptable to scientists in the health care field…

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About the Author Rosemary Makar, MD Author Rosemary Makar is an American Board of Pathology certified pathologist in anatomic/clinical pathology with a subspecialty in hematopathology. As an assistant professor in Pathology at Kuwait University School of Medicine, she was involved in pathology research. This included a research grant funded by the Terry Fox Foundation for Cancer Research. Realizing that health care is evolving and understanding the lack of experience MDs have in management, Dr. Makar joined the Health Care Management Certificate Program at OHSU School of Management. One of the requirements in the Health Care Program Management class was to write an essay applying project management to health care. Having experience in health care research, she decided to pursue this area for her research paper. Dr. Makar plans to continue exploring, learning , and applying management techniques in health care work.