The Impact of Project Management in Healthcare Product Development

With the cost of healthcare and the long timelines for development of new products continually in the spotlight, perhaps never more so than during the COVID-19 pandemic, multiple studies have evaluated the investment required by pharmaceutical and biotech companies to bring a new product to market, with recent estimates ranging from $300 million to $2.8 billion. The timelines and cost are driven in part by the complexity of product development, which requires the careful integration of many disparate activities into a well-orchestrated and executable plan. A recent perspective by Wagner, et al. in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery noted that “in the absence of strong coordination and communication, the complex and dynamic process of drug development frequently fails.” Project Managers in this ecosystem play an increasingly important role in bringing new therapies to patients as quickly as possible and minimizing failure.