Healthcare Project Management: Fundamentals to Practice

This course introduces the foundational concepts of project management in healthcare for learners who are new to formal project management but work in healthcare environments where change initiatives, process improvements, and organizational projects occur regularly. Learners begin by exploring what qualifies as a project in healthcare and how project work differs from ongoing operations. Through realistic healthcare examples and applied activities, they practice identifying projects and examining common project types, including quality improvement initiatives, technology implementations, workflow redesign efforts, and regulatory or compliance-related changes. The course then introduces the healthcare project lifecycle, helping learners understand how projects move from initial ideas through planning, execution, monitoring, and closure. Along the way, learners identify key project roles, explore how clinical and operational stakeholders influence project decisions, and develop practical stakeholder analysis skills that support collaboration and communication. Building on this foundation, learners develop the core components of a healthcare project charter. They practice defining project problems, creating SMART goals, identifying success measures, and establishing project scope, assumptions, and constraints. Through scenario-based exercises and hands-on activities, learners apply these concepts to realistic healthcare situations. By the end of the course, learners will have created a basic healthcare project charter that serves as a practical foundation for planning and managing a healthcare project. This charter becomes the starting point for the more advanced planning, execution, and sustainability topics explored throughout the remainder of the specialization.

This course introduces you to planning and executing healthcare projects in real-world clinical and operational environments. Using a running case study of a remote patient monitoring (RPM) pilot at North Valley Health System, you will learn how project managers transform a project charter into a practical project management plan that guides project work from planning through execution. You’ll develop key project planning skills by creating work breakdown structures (WBS), building project schedules and simple Gantt charts, estimating time and effort, and identifying dependencies and constraints that commonly affect healthcare initiatives. You’ll also learn how to develop realistic budgets, align resources with project needs, and account for the operational realities of healthcare organizations. The course explores stakeholder analysis, communication planning, and risk management, helping you identify key stakeholders, tailor communication strategies, address resistance to change, and document project risks. You’ll also practice evaluating scope changes, preparing for go-live activities, and using dashboards, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor project performance. By the end of the course, you will be able to create a basic healthcare project management plan and apply practical tools that help healthcare projects move successfully from planning into execution.