These 4 Commonly Overlooked Points in Strategic Hospital Planning Can Cost Your Facilities Hundreds of Thousands!
December 29, 2018
When you incorporate a strategic program that accurately reflects your operations — and will cover the business strategy and aspects of your facility — you will have a greater perspective of where the hospital is running efficiently and improvements need to be made. We have detailed the most commonly overlooked points needed in strategic planning for hospitals for the long-term and why strategic planning is important in healthcare.
Points to Integrate Into Your Strategic Healthcare Plan
1. Watch 10 years ahead
The things that are changing within healthcare will not remain stagnant, so it’s crucial to practice what’s typically called “creating an envisioned future” or “scenario planning” in your strategic plan for a hospital. Answer the questions listed below to the best of your ability to do so:
- Where’s regulation leaning towards?
- What innovations will be coming into the industry in the following 5-15 years?
- What research, operations and treatments are going to change?
- How’s the practice of medicine transforming?
2. Take your role in this future into account
You must consider what type of healthcare hospital and clinic you are (i.e., research, for-profit, children’s, etc.) and figure out the way your approach to healthcare is being affected by evolutions around you for this step. If there are various new urgent care facilities opening up around the area, how are you going to hold up? Are they going to be an origin of competition or a source for added revenue?
3. Set your sights
The initial couple steps have given you help in creating the context for your strategic and operational planning in healthcare. You’ll require objectives at this point — or highly organized aims. As you’re creating a goal, it ought to be centered around what your institute is attempting to strategically fulfill. You would be wise to think about what your clinic’s objectives are and how such goals correlate. You undoubtedly are looking for great health results, but how are finances fitting in? How about your skills, technology and staff?
When you’re in a highly diverse location, for instance, and are helping a lot of various demographics, you might need healthcare professionals who can speak a variety of languages and/or translators. This might be a goal you think about regarding the skills your staff will need down the road.
If you are offering care to many disparate populations, such populations could need different medical requirements and accounting in healthcare. That means you as a hospital have to be ready for the kinds of medical issues you may run into more often in order to effectively communicate with the affected patients. The vast majority of healthcare groups and hospitals bring all their objectives into a ‘Balanced Scorecard’ using a procedure map detailing how they work together.
4. Track your goals
You’ll now want to consider how you’re going to track the high-level organizational goals you set. You will want to think about the following elements for your strategic planning process in healthcare:
- What level of this can be overlapped?
- What aspects are crucial for your strategy?
- What other aspects do you need to track for regulations and other reporting demands?
Within conventional strategic planning, each one of the elements you track will be aligned closely with your strategic objectives. You will see how both insurers and regulators have their own determined measures they are looking for you to record within the healthcare industry. This means you need to consider your tracking processes in their entirety and think about the way some of your strategic trackings could be the same.