Healthcare Strategic Plan

Strategic planning is a proven resource for enabling health care organizations to navigate an environment that evolves continually and allows organizational leaders to clearly identify and communicate organizational objectives. [1] Health care administrators often fill the strategic plan leader role for health care organizations. When executed correctly, strategic planning results in an ongoing process of discovery and improvement. [2]

The following article details the basics of the most common strategic planning technique known to organizational leaders – SWOT analysis.

Analyzing the external environment

Strategic plan leaders begin analyzing external influences by segmenting patients into groups relevant to organizational objectives.

They now categorize the previous internal and external influence into one of four SWOT categories: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, or Threats.

From external influences, organizations must exploit opportunities and protect themselves from threats. For internal influences, decision makers develop strategic plans to mitigate weaknesses and nurture and grow strengths in order to maximize organizational performance. Plan leaders also delineate the importance of each influence by ranking results as high, medium, or low importance, rankings that the organization to decide which strategies to pursuei.

Strategic Alternatives

During the fourth phase, the strategic planning team formally records alternative actions into a document without regard for whether the idea is viable. The strategic planning steering committee then classifies the alternative actions into defined action groups. Now group participants refine and vet the suggestions while narrowing down the scope of activities to realistic undertakings. During this stage, the steering committee identifies and discards the suggestions that do not meet organizational objectives or fall outside the scope of possibility. When this phase ends, the steering committee will have identified a maximum of 20 action items as viable options for strategic

[3] At the time, the facility managed bed using handwritten notes on clipboards, which greatly limited the amount of patients that could check in each day. The organization opted to expand on an internal strength, the TeleTracking patient flow client that the facility already utilized for transfers, by expanding the technology to manage bed occupancy. After initiating this strategic action, the medical center experienced a transfer volume increase from 1,200 to 4,000 patients per year a $53 million dollar increase in