Question

Regulations and Accountability / Question 4: Strategic Priorities

You have just been appointed the Director of Planning for Community Hospital, a 250-bed acute care facility. The Chief Executive Officer has asked you to analyze the organization's five strategic initiatives and recommend some priorities for Community Hospital. The strategic initiatives are: 1) Develop a new Perinatal Center; 2) Expand the hospital's ambulatory care presence in the secondary service areas; 3) Launch a hospital?wide cost containment program; 4) Implement a medical staff development plan; 5) Become a Magnet Hospital. Considering the various decision support tools dealing with regulations and accountability, how would you go about this assignment and how would you apply these tools?

Answer 1

The key purpose here is to prioritize the five strategic initiatives in order. The right approach will be to do this in a systematic manner

• Situation analysis
• Target analysis
• Effort & resource estimation
• Prioritization
• Execution plan

We begin by analyzing the current situation of the hospital. In order to determine our current standing we should perform a SWOT analysis on the hospital to better understand our current situation. In addition, we also need to consider the financial strength of the hospital (some of the initiatives will be expensive). In addition, we also need to perform a competitor analysis to check if we fall behind in terms of branding, facilities, cost, etc. against other hospitals in the area. Once we have correctly analyzed the current standing, we can move to analyze our targets

In the next step, our task will be to analyze the initiatives. The assumption here is that the analysis as the base for initiatives are already done. For example, the team has already identified that developing a new Perinatal Center will be beneficial in terms of brand and also financially (considering the locality and the market around). Hence what we need to do here is determine the payoff of each of the initiatives. We also need to measure these payoffs on a similar scale in order to compare the initiatives. Again, we need to consider other fringe parameters here such as brand impact, long term financial impact, ethical and social impact, etc. After this we need to move on to the tangible estimations.

Here, our task should be to estimate the effort and financial resources that will be required in order to roll out the strategic initiatives. Considering our current situation, the expected impact and this estimation will help us in prioritizing the initiatives. Upon completing this step, we should be able to easily prioritize the initiatives in order. Here, we should also consider various dependencies. For example, initiative 5 could depend on successfully completing initiative 1 and 2.

Prioritization step will take the weights from previous steps and eventually list the order in which we should take the initiatives.

Once the order of prioritization is complete, next we need to prepare the execution plan. So far we have only worked “what” we will do. However, the execution plan will depict “how” we shall accomplish the completion of our initiatives.