What Constitutes Hospital Turnkey Project Management

Setting up hospitals or healthcare service centers is a highly strenuous task. Nevertheless, with the introduction of total healthcare turnkey solutions, the process has become simple.

Entrepreneurs who wish to set up healthcare services can take professional help from a hospital project management consultant.

Moreover, the hospital management will also have to take care of a lot of paperwork, both at the government and regulatory levels before commissioning the hospital. The best way to address this mammoth task of setting up hospitals is to apply total healthcare turnkey solutions, which will make healthcare project management and establishment seamless.

For this, the professional guidance of hospital project consulting and management firms become essential. When it is a turnkey contract, the concerned management can just pass on the business-idea to the consultant who agrees to make the project viable and who has the ability and required knowhow to take required actions to make it possible. The contracted healthcare consulting firm will undertake a concept to commissioning assignment with responsibility and then handover the completed hospital to the management. There are some healthcare consulting firms who will go a step further by handholding their staff, ironing out various matters that need fine tuning till the facility starts functioning efficiently and effectively.

The turnkey projects for healthcare or hospital services involve distinct types of inter-laced tasks right from the initiation process. Hospital project management involves different activities such as feasibility study, developing funding & investor document/pitch, hospital infrastructure planning, medical equipment planning, procurement management plan, operations management, marketing, patient acquisition strategy, etc. The consultant will prepare a detailed document with requisite PERT charts that highlight all major and secondary activities, interdependencies, overlaps of tasks, responsibilities and authorities, steps to alleviate any hurdles, etc. These will be strictly adhered to as time overruns lead to cost overruns resulting in direct impact on the project viability.

Steps in a turnkey hospital project management can be enlisted as below:

Hospital Master Plans

• Project definition and promoter goals
• Stakeholders identification and governance definition
• Medical, technical, logistics and capacity programs
• Postulations for clinical service mix and medico-technical efficiency

Feasibility Studies and Technical Proposals

• Medical strategy, stakes and goals
• Market assessment and gap analysis of demand and supply for healthcare in the primary area
• Financial Feasibility study

Functional requirements and main circulation principles

• Site's limitations
• Technical program
• Infrastructure Pre-programming
• Functional Architectural Orientations
• Master Plan
• Area program
• Probable stacking program
• Budget assessment

Financial Engineering

• Construction cost evaluation
• Equipment cost appraisal
• Revenue and operating costs assessment

Architectural, MEP, HVAC, Interiors

• Architectural and engineering studies
• Schematic Drawings right through till GFC Drawings
• Project Management selection
• Application for requisite plan approvals, other permissions and licences
• Tendering and selection of contractor/s for the infrastructure
• Detailed drawings for each subcontractor
• Detailed technical requirements
• Construction
• Final review of infrastructure and documentation

Moveable Assets

• Final list of equipment
• Technical specifications
• Pre-installation drawings
• Tenders for medical and non-medical equipment
• Techno-commercial analysis
• Vendor negotiations and placement of procurement orders covering all aspects of warranty/guarantee, AMCs and CMCs

Installation and Commissioning

• Pre-installation preparation
• Receipt of equipment
• Inspection and Quality controls
• Trials on equipment performance
• Installation and Commissioning
• Documentation and SOPs for equipment management system
• End users' training

Human Resources and Procedures

• Hospital policies and SOPs (as per accreditation norms), protocols, and quality systems documentation
• Establishment of an organogram
• Detailed listing of all staff (medical, nursing, paramedical, technical, administrative, support services)
• Job profiling
• Staff recruitment
• Training of staff
• Quality management

Operations & Management

• Operations and management
• Quality processes implementation and tracking
• Internal performance audits
• Skills assessment and improvement programs
• Key performance indicators
• Financial management
• Community health programs

The above stages highlight the broad outlines of a turnkey hospital project management and implementation from a consultants’ perspective, bases on decades of experience.

In effect, each of these steps are broken up into innumerable smaller, sub-steps that are important to execute in a timely manner for the larger program to be implemented.

A turnkey project management group may comprise a consortium of many sub-groups having their own areas of expertise. Yet the hospital consulting services firm, as a lead consultant, will have the ability to steer this team with proper co-ordination such that the project is implemented within the prescribed time and to the total satisfaction of the client.