The US health care industry, representing 18% of the GDP and growing, has significant challenges balancing high quality health care with financial constraints while complying with stringent government regulations for cost recovery. US healthcare operates with small profit margins forcing growing health care systems to be agile and innovative. With a large percentage of the US population depending on Medicaid and Medicare programs, health care systems must provide unique services to meet each patient’s needs by working collaboratively with local competition and developing proactive programs to improve the health of everyone served by each healthcare system.

One of the most dramatic recent improvements in healthcare delivery comes through Population Health, which focuses on innovating high-quality, patient-centric care. This creates new challenges and opportunities for providers, especially Northwell Health, which has a service area covering over 20 million patients throughout the New York Metropolitan region.

Northwell Health finds that patient-centric care requires a high degree of cross-organizational coordination including partnerships with many non-Northwell entities. Example? partnerships undertaken by Northwell Health increasingly include external organizations such as Community Based Organizations, Independent Physician Associations, Skilled Nursing Facilities, and competitor healthcare systems. Projects with these organizations have required NorthwellHealth teams to transcend their traditional approach to project management, which was once focused on enterprise system-only initiatives. For example, Northwell Health has created an extensive evaluation program producing evidence-based research using clinical, claims, and other quality indicators. Northwell Health has also spearheaded an extensive collaborative partnership with the New York State Department of Health, through the Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) Program, on Health Information Technology improvement programs.

In order to develop and implement these large-scale integrated delivery system reform initiatives, Northwell Health created a project management methodology based on the Project Management Institutes (PMI) framework, tailored to meet Northwell’s unique needs, and maintained by the Information Systems Project Management Office (IS PMO). The IS PMO is responsible for the Project Lifecycle methodology, which encompasses the tools, processes, and procedures, that support projects in Information Services and Medical Informatics. Importantly, it maintains the mature project framework that these large-scale initiatives require with updates based on PMI and other standards. These tools allow project teams to plan, estimate, and assign resources, and accurately track work performance data, including benefits and ROI. This has become essential in an era where delivering high value collaborative patient-centric care requires transcending the boundaries of the hospital.