Using Project & Risk Management to Build Your Startup

The healthcare industry is laden with risks. While businesses regularly announce forecasts and projections, managers understand that the ability to manage existing and potential risks can mean the difference between success or failure.

To survive in today’s volatile economy, your medical-based startup should have a risk management plan. Typically, a team of stakeholders will identify potential risks that your business is likely to face and provide strategies for dealing with them.

Moreover, while pursuing new projects to grow your business, you should have a proper project management plan in place. Project management is the organizing and managing of existing resources to help in achieving the end goal. It also involves dealing with potential risks to ensure the success of projects and, consequently, business growth.

How to Use Project and Risk Management Business Success

1. Comply with HIPAA and Hitrust requirements to protect your data

Healthcare organizations need to comply with HIPAA and Hitrust requirements to protect patient data from unauthorized access. Theft or unauthorized access of confidential data leads to litigations and penalties.

The Health Insurance Portability and Availability Act (HIPAA) provides a set of requirements meant to safeguard and improve patient data security. On the other hand, the Health Information Trust Alliance (Hitrust) is a framework that puts together controls of several standards, including ISO/IEC 27000-series information security standards and the HIPAA, to make it easy for organizations to comply with all the data security requirements.

The best way to deal with data risks is to prioritize them. You can prioritize your firm’s data security efforts based on expected risks. To identify which risks to tackle first, determine two things:

• How much money your business will lose if a specific risk occurs
• The likelihood of a particular risk occurring

Create a table detailing the various risks and their probability of occurring. From there, focus on high-value, high-probability risks first, as they are the ones likely to cause severe damage.

2. Create a project management strategy to steer your progress

Project management involves five stages:

• Initiation phase This is the first stage of project management, and it involves coming up with a business case that justifies the need for the project. At this stage, consider the project costs, project timeline, and potential financial benefits.

• Project planning At the planning stage, you determine the resources that the project will require, assign tasks, establish clear goals, milestones, and Key Performance Indicators, and identify potential risks and how to deal with them. You need to communicate project objectives with all project participants to ensure that everybody works towards the end goal.

• Executing the project Project execution involves the actual carrying out of the project. There should be clear milestones of what needs to be achieved within a specific period to ensure progress.

• Monitoring and control This stage involves monitoring the project progress. You can use project management tools to monitor and control your projects effectively. The tools enable smooth communication between the various stakeholders. Some good examples of project management tools available on the market include Asana, Trello, and Podio.  Project monitoring helps you to identify unattained milestones and why they have not been attained. You can then come up with control measures to correct deviations. You also need to measure projects against set Key Performance Indices.

• Project closure This involves project completion. At project completion, you can note down the challenges you faced in the previous projects and come up with ways to avoid them in the next projects.

3. Identify risks and plan on how to manage them

At the project planning stage, you identify potential risks and decide on how you will handle them. Depending on the frequency and severity of potential risks, below are some ways of dealing with them:

• Accepting them – If a risk has a small and insignificant effect on your medical-based startup, you can accept it. Accepting means that you allow the risk to happen without doing anything about it. If dealing with a risk is more expensive than allowing it to happen, it makes sense to accept it.
• Avoiding the risk – If a risk has a substantial negative impact on a project’s success and is too costly to mitigate, you should avoid it. You may have to change the project plan or do away with the project entirely.
• Transferring the risk – You can transfer a risk by insuring yourself or outsourcing a particular product or service.
• Mitigate the risk – Risk mitigation involves preparing for the risk and coming up with ways to lessen its effects. Diversifying products or services is one way of mitigating risks.

Project and risk management are crucial to business growth. Project management will help you to identify and plan for potential risks and carry out projects successfully.

To succeed in the healthcare industry, you need a robust risk management plan. In the current highly-dynamic economy, inability to predict and adequately prepare for risks leads to business failure.