If you’re in operations or executive leadership at a healthcare technology company, this scenario might ring familiar:

A few months back, your legal team flagged the current compliance documentation as a risk. You added a SOC2 Type II certification to the engineering roadmap, but it hasn’t moved forward. And then more recently, one of your bigger clients implemented an updated BAA requirement.

These projects likely have owners in spirit. Compliance is in control of monitoring everything HIPAA related. Technology is responsible for prioritizing and moving the needle with industry certifications to keep the company competitive and up-to-date. But none of the teams have the bandwidth to move any of these projects forward in a way that is meaningful or productive.

When projects slip in healthtech, the cost can be significant. In healthcare, missing deadlines doesn’t always mean just a delayed launch. It can result in paused renewals, failing compliance audits, and regulatory risk that can cost your company big money. But we’re not telling you anything you don’t already know.

Three Projects Overwhelming Health Tech Companies

• Scheduled risk assessments
• Semi-frequent policy updates
• Staff training
• Incident response plans
• Documentation trails that are audit-ready

The big challenge we see health tech companies doing $1M+ ARR encounter with HIPAA compliance is that it’s actually cross-functional work. So while your compliance officer might own it, the engineering team is responsible for related technical safeguards, HR is responsible for staff training, legal is responsible for incident response, operations has a hand in it, and executive leadership is ultimately accountable for any slip-ups.

 Without a trained project manager to coordinate all of your teams around a compliance roadmap, everything will move slowly and risk will compound.

2. SOC 2 Certifications

Soc 2 Type II certification is the new table stakes for enterprise sales in healthcare technology. Many of your enterprise prospects won’t be able to move forward with any new healthcare technology unless this certification is in place.

What is a SOC 2 Type II audit?

An independent CPA firm comes in and takes anywhere from six to 12 months, and watches your company closely for continuous operations of specific controls across security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. The preparation for an audit like this is significant and not always well planned. Bringing in a fractionally trained team member can help offset some of this pain.

A fractional PM can help:

• Own the project plan
• Manage an evidence collection timeline
• Oversee cross-team coordination
• Maintain regular updates to leadership and sales about where the certification stands

Your risk without using a project manager who is fully dedicated to the prep and ongoing audit is that the audit won’t be managed well. This results in a longer audit that costs anywhere from 40-60% more than originally budgeted and stalls multiple deals in your pipeline.

• Data mapping and transformation across systems with different schemas, terminology standards (HL7, FHIR), and data quality profiles
• Clinical workflow redesign for every user group touching the new system
• Regulatory compliance validation (HIPAA, state-specific data privacy laws)
• Integration with ancillary systems — billing, scheduling, lab, pharmacy, payer connections
• Training programs for clinical staff, administrative staff, and technical users
• Go-live sequencing across departments or client sites, often in multiple waves
• Contingency and rollback planning for every phase

These migrations are known to quickly bust the budget and timeline. And the primary reason? Poor project management. A dedicated, experienced project manager is the difference between a successful and a draining, costly migration.

What are the risks of mismanaged healthtech projects?

Compliance projects tend to drift without well-defined governance. Projects like a HIPAA risk assessment sit at the finish line for three months without being completed.

Oftentimes, this has to do with dependencies, or tasks that rely on the completion of other tasks. Having these dependencies well documented, mapped, and communicated is the job of a healthcare project manager. It quiets noisy blockers for your team and mitigates the risk of going over budget and timeline.

When you’re dealing with projects that span multiple departments, the web of communication becomes increasingly complex. Having a command center led by a senior project manager helps keep communication between groups streamlined. It quickly straightens out any miscommunications, and they identify and flatten risk before it becomes a threat to your go-lives or enterprise sales process.

Finally, a risk that is often not tracked but oftentimes apparent is the revenue impact of stalled healthtech projects. A SOC 2 certification that took six months longer than usual often results in six months of enterprise deals that stalled in the pipeline. HIPAA audits that fail due to poor governance of documentation trails can pause large client relationships and put your company at risk of legal action.

How Fractional PMs Offset Risk for Healthtech Companies

• Time-boxed: things like SOC 2 certs, HIPAA program buildouts, and EHR migrations will have defined timelines. Since they aren’t permanently ongoing functions, a full-time employee may not be necessary. A fractional project manager comes in for the duration of these projects, scales up quickly, brings fresh perspective, and exits cleanly.
• Cross-Functional Coordination: The core value a project manager brings to these projects is the ability and experience to coordinate multiple departments while maintaining a single source of truth on project status. This is extremely difficult for a full-time PM to pick up on top of their existing duties.
• High-Stakes: If we take the SOC 2 project for example, this may require 20 hours per week of dedicated project management. The fractional model lets you scale hours up or down to the right duration based on your needs in the moment.
• Specialization Requirements: A fractional PM who has managed 8 SOC 2 certifications knows which controls are consistently under-evidenced, which auditors move fastest, and which remediation activities take longer than clients expect.

While you might think you’re shelling out extra money for an extra teammate, here’s what you’re getting back from that investment:

• Pipeline velocity: when critical projects don’t stall out, such as a SOC 2 certification, and it’s delivered on-time in 7 months instead of 14 months later, you can unlock a great deal of pipeline value that would otherwise be stuck
• Audit readiness: Remediation costs can climb up to $500K, and having someone prepping you for that audit can save you thousands of dollars in financial damages and reputation damages
• Bandwidth: If your FT team is managing these time-boxed projects, they’re not improving and innovating on your product, allowing competitors to beat you to market with feature upgrades.
• Confidence: Well-managed compliance projects build organizational confidence. Confident teams move faster and produce better outcomes.

Closing

Health tech companies who have a system for handling compliance are the ones who find growth comes more easily, retention rates continue to climb, and teams are overall happier. At $1M+ ARR, compliance is no longer a side project or something that a single compliance officer is entirely responsible for across the organization. You’re winning bigger accounts, which means higher regulatory exposure risk. A fractional project manager who specializes in health tech can help solidify the infrastructure that enables easy, high-retention growth.

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