Healthcare Strategic Planning

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The impact of strategic planning in the health care industries Why Strategic Planning? Advantage: SP is a rational process that aims to bring the future closer and allows us to both study and conduct simulations of the future. The process can reveal previously hidden opportunities or threats,6 providing the option to act on them early. Strategic planning establishes a clear and explicit framework with criteria for making day-to-day decisions and identifying fragmentary and unaligned choices or personal value judgments, all of which facilitates and simplifies managerial decision-making. The development of SP encourages the participation and commitment of the entire HO in achieving the planned results, thus becoming an important element in institutional …show more content…

This experience included such settings as employee wellness clinics, ambulatory clinics, medical practices and hospitals. In all, I visited twenty or so healthcare organizations, reviewing their strategic plans and planning processes. In the years since, over two thirds of them are either ‘out of business’, just about to close, or at best struggle financially. What went wrong? Mostly, so I found, was a lack of financial sustainability resulting from a ‘trial and error’ approach rather than a due diligence focused healthcare strategic planning process. Equipped with ideas and desires, most did not properly vet their plans or even once prepare a valid financial feasibility study to establish the sustainability of their health or medical services …show more content…

There I had the opportunity to formally plan new and strategic healthcare services. Having learned from others’ failures, I was adamant about “doing it– right”, by applying the deliberate steps to the strategic planning process. The result was the new development and sustained operation of an imaging center, a 99 bed skilled nursing facility, a psychiatric inpatient department, and a home healthcare company. All this took five years to complete, of which the first year was dedicated to the initial strategic planning process. This due diligence phase included market studies to understand demand, financial feasibility studies, and operations plans for each proposed entity. Earlier, I had developed a freestanding Center for Health Promotion for a University and Academic Medical Center, and, later, as a consultant, I developed a full service, self-sustaining Wellness Center for a hospital in Berlin Germany – one of those types of organizations which, during my internship, I saw fail so often. In the case of the Germany based facility, it took fifteen months of strategic and business planning, and two years to develop. Again and again, proper strategic planning in healthcare and successful outcome are very much

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