Strategic planning is an important concept and process that is used to help manage your healthcare practice.
It provides a framework for identifying and prioritizing the most important objectives that you want to achieve within your practice, as well as how to measure success. Implementing strategic planning in your practice will help you make better decisions about what needs work, which strategies should be employed, and how resources should be allocated.
In this post, we will discuss some of the most significant trends for managing a healthcare practice. These changes are not just happening in our country but across the world.
The Importance of Strategic Planning in Healthcare
A well-executed strategy allows healthcare providers to manage their business and make the appropriate changes in response to these new trends.
It’s important that it is implemented at all levels of practice. This will help ensure consistency and efficiency and improve staff morale.
Additionally, implementing strategic planning in your practice will help you better compete within your community and continue to grow your business.
Strategic Planning Process
The first step, as with any strategic plan, is deciding what needs fixing and defining the problem or objective you want to address.
After identifying the need for change and defining a strategy, it is important that you include all stakeholders in the decision-making process. Learn from your colleagues and other stakeholders.
Once you have formulated a plan, you need to establish metrics to measure the success of the strategy.
There are a variety of ways to do this depending on what resources you have and how closely tied these metrics are to your overall strategy.
A common mistake is to use measures that are tied to revenue, but this could be misleading when revenue is also affected by external events such as pharmaceutical price increases or changes in reimbursement rates.
Building a Health-Driven Business
It is important that strategies are implemented at all levels of your practice so that a consistent tone is set among staff members and stakeholders.
This is not only an effective way to improve services but also an essential component of finding the right team members. Retaining quality staff will help ensure you have the expertise to deliver quality healthcare services indefinitely.
More importantly, strategic planning will help you become a health-driven organization. With the help of your staff, you will take the initiative to continue to evolve and improve services. You won’t be stuck with the same practices simply because they are profitable or well established.
If you are truly dedicated to being health-driven, then your business decisions should reflect that philosophy so that patients will be getting better care in more convenient locations and for a lower price.
A health-driven business does not make money at the expense of people’s health — but rather delivers better value and continually improves its services to best meet its customers’ needs.
Why You Should Consider Hiring A Chief Operating Officer (COO) to Manage Your Healthcare Practice
The chief operating officer (COO) is the highest-ranking business executive within an organization. He or she is usually very well experienced and is in possession of higher-level qualifications to suit the business they are working in, such as the Online healthcare mba.
A COO oversees all operational activities and ensures that they are carried out in a consistent manner and in support of the strategic business goals.
The COO works with other high-level leaders such as the company’s president or CEO, board of directors, and other executives to formulate strategic planning for the rest of the organization.
Many organizations have adopted this position over time as part of their organizational structure.
Why Hire A COO?
In a smaller organization especially, it can be difficult to find someone who has both strategic thinking skills and experience managing operations effectively.
Managing operations is very different than managing people, focusing on the needs of patients and providers. You can get the best of both worlds by hiring a COO.
It will increase staff morale, which leads to greater productivity and better care for your patients. In addition, the COO will help you develop processes and workflows that meet your organization’s goals.
Once you have more efficient processes in place, you will be able to take advantage of technology to increase efficiency and reduce costs.
Structure of a Healthcare Implementation Plan
Before starting the implementation, a record-keeping mechanism should be established in order to capture details of the project.
You should check when the project is going to start and end, as well as who will be part of it. A task list should also be created that lists activities that need to be completed during the project’s duration.
This will ensure that you are working on activities at all times so that nothing slips through the cracks and causes delays.
You will want to start by identifying who has been affected by a project like this so far and making sure they are included in its development from the beginning.
How to Start Your Strategic Planning Process
There are a few key areas to consider when starting your strategic planning process. These key areas include the ability to:
- Identify the problem or objective you are trying to address.
- Identify current metrics and reasons why your organization is successful.
- Create your ideal strategic plan in terms of goals, resources, and budget allocation.
By identifying what needs to change within your organization and collaborating with staff, you will be able to execute a strategic plan that will benefit both you and your patients.
Strategy Implementation Logistics
Logistics are the basic processes that make up a project, such as scheduling meetings, tracking tasks and milestones, and keeping track of communication.
The logistic details can be streamlined by establishing a meeting schedule with your key stakeholders.
Once these meetings have been established, make sure you follow through on each one by sending out any emails or other communications that should result in a decision being made.
Also, be sure to reiterate coming back to the team for feedback if you have been unsuccessful in getting them back into the loop after a meeting.
The most efficient way to manage logistics is to create an online meeting log so that everyone is able to check off their items as they are completed.
The Benefits of Setting Goals in the Healthcare Industry
Setting goals allows you to identify what you want to achieve and the best way to obtain it.
If a goal is not met, it is important to analyze why this happened and how you can improve in that area moving forward so that you can avoid having the same problem.
Setting goals will also allow you to pay attention to key areas in your organization and give your business a clear purpose.
This focuses on the big picture by identifying what your organization’s strengths are, what needs improvement, and how those improvements will be made.
Set Goals for Your Business or Practice
Here are a few ways in which set goals for your business or practice will benefit you and your organization:
- Increasing accountability
- Lowering expenses
- Improving response time
- Setting standards for care
- Improving patient experience
- Increasing staff morale
If you want to increase response time and lower expenses, then your performance metrics need to be clearly identified so that everyone is on the same page with respect to what needs to be done and by when it needs to be done by.
Know Your Metrics to Measure Performance
To improve your organization’s health and wellbeing, first you should understand your business metrics.
The purpose of metrics is to help organizations meet their goals and objectives by encouraging people to set results they can measure.
You need to ensure that your data is organized in a manner that groups different types of information together so that it can be accurately analyzed.
One of the best ways to do this is to list a set of strong key performance indicators (KPIs).
KPI Measures are how you evaluate your success in meeting specific objectives by measuring raw numbers (measurement) or determining how closely the result matches the original measure (criterion).
Strategic planning is an important process, but it’s only effective if you can apply it to your daily tasks.
The Importance of Checklists in Strategic Planning
Checklists help provide a clear, step-by-step way to accomplish a goal by giving you a standard set of instructions that are easy to follow and act as a reminder of what needs to be done.
Checklists also help to ensure that you don’t forget anything that needs to be accomplished and helps those who are following a checklist identify any changes they should make while completing it.
Checklist items can be added when you are identifying your strategic plan’s goals, objectives, and their resources.
By doing this, you will have a clear inventory of what is needed to complete projects on time and effectively.
Making checklists part of your daily routine is an easy way for everyone on your staff to communicate about their work because it gives them a clear understanding of the project’s end goal.