A new comprehensive mathematical assessment methodology for team collaboration and integration and project performance in healthcare construction

In the antebellum period of the late 1940s, the generation now known as the ‘Baby Boomers’ was born. This generation became one of the most notorious in American history, and today represents one of the more urgent challenges in the country. As this population reaches their 60s, 70s, and beyond, their appetite for healthcare services increases; a 6% per annum increase in healthcare spending is forecast 2019 to 2025, which eclipses the forecast GDP growth by 1. 3% over the same period. This forecast spending increase simply must be accompanied by a corresponding increase in healthcare construction spending to build new facilities and upgrade existing ones to meet demand. However, healthcare construction is a higher-risk and higher complexity endeavor than construction in other sectors (e.g.residential). These factors pose a challenge to the efficiency and performance of healthcare projects in terms of schedule, budget, and quality metrics. This imminent demand calls for more research to understand potential methods of improvement to the construction projects for these healthcare projects. Existing research focused on project delivery systems (PDSs), particularly the Integrated Project Delivery system (IPD), which leverage contractual language and relationships to enhance performance. While it is certainly true that IPD has been shown to improve performance, and that stories of this system’s success are emerging in trade literature and anecdotes, IPD alone does not predicate project success. Specifically, what is often overlooked is that IPD is a naturally more collaborative project delivery system, but this is often misrepresented as: IPD is the only collaborative method. This is not the case—other PDS systems are perfectly capable of implementing collaborative practices. This gap in knowledge will be addressed in this study, which seeks to benchmark and thereby understand healthcare project performance in two ways: the Project Performance Index (PPI) and the Team Collaboration and Integration Score (TC&I). Previous studies have not examined the relationship between factors in any quantitative way, relying instead on the opinions of subject matter leaders and experts, which are inherently subjective. Thus, this dissertation will present comprehensive methodologies for the assessment of both project performance and team collaboration in a never-before-seen way—using precise mathematics. The relation between PPI and TC&I showed that there is a positive correlation between TC&I and PPI: as the level of collaboration/integration increases, the overall project performance increases. However, this study found that team collaboration is not intrinsically tied to project delivery system – i.e. , older systems that have long been thought to be less collaborative (like Design-Bid-Build) can achieve collaboration and integration nevertheless. It should nevertheless be noted that while DBB and CMR projects could and occasionally did outperform IPD projects in the TC&I metric, IPD was on average significantly better performing. Traditional project delivery systems can have teams with high morale, a spirit of mutual respect, high level of transparency, high level of trust, high level of worker engagement, and project teams that consistently implement the lean tools and methods that support collaboration.