The healthcare industry which is one of the oldest industries runs on traditional values and principles. Changing government “Healthcare Reforms” often leads to more chaos than order. Compliances, caregivers, doctors, nurses, clinicians, and administrative staff often face the music because of mismanagement. A defense mechanism operates in the background to stay within the perforated guidelines. This prevents the optimal use of resources, increased costs, and delayed or redundant projects. These factors become barriers to entry for project management in the healthcare industry.

Let’s explore the top 8 barriers to entry for project management in the healthcare industry.

1. Government policy
This is one of the main barriers to any innovations in the healthcare industry. It is always observed that the government rules and policies have been the major hindrance to a successful healthcare project implementation. This is because at very steps the healthcare projects are levied upon strict rules with regards to licensing, limitation to access raw materials, acquiring resources, etc. As government policies tend to limit or prevent entry to healthcare industries with various controls like licensing requirements, limits to access to raw materials, etc.

2. Lack of Leadership
The Healthcare sectors neglect to prioritize important projects such as critical healthcare to administrative focused projects. In the absence of an effective leader with a strategic vision, the projects suffer the consequences of inadequate budgets, delayed or redundant delivery, and very few resources.

3. Lack of Skilled Manpower
Skilled resources that have the necessary exposure to a multifaceted organization, project managers who understand compliances in the caregiving industry are imperative in healthcare. The project management framework often suffers the neglect of ignorance from inexperienced staff or lack of know-how.

4. Project Metrics and Data
Healthcare Industry has strict compliance regarding the confidentiality of data. The lack of sufficient data makes it difficult to assess the metrics over a large period. Historic data empowers an organization to quantify metrics over a large period that helps in better decision making.

5. Adapting to Change
Adapting to newer technologies in healthcare for project managers seems like a daunting task. An escalated political dichotomy between caregivers and administration oftentimes leaves little or no room for conversations regarding a newer and quicker way forward. The rigidity in existing silos costs the organization in terms of money, resources, and failed projects.

6. Economies of Scale
This has also been one of the major factors for limiting the success of many healthcare projects. So what is the economies of scale, as defined by The Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) means, “ the gains provided through consolidation of efforts or volume.” (Team, June 3, 2020).This means offering more patient care and medicine by using very few resources thus saving a huge amount of money. This poses a major problem for new entrants in the healthcare industry.

7. Product differentiation
This factor also affects the new entrants in the healthcare industry as they need to strive harder to match up to the brand identification and customer loyalties which is been set up by their competitors already existing the market. This requires the new entrants to bring in new and exciting products with unique features to match the prevailing competition.

8. Capital requirements
Every project needs capital for the initial expenditure to pay for its overall infrastructure, machines, software application, R&D, and advertising, etc. It’s also important to have a proper amount of budget set aside for various contingencies once the project is commenced.

So these were the top 8 for every new entrant with regards to project management in the healthcare industry.