7 Reasons Strategic Planning in Healthcare Practices Is Essential

Healthcare is a flooded market. While everyone needs a doctor that they can rely on, there are advertisements for a different health office at every street corner.

That makes it hard for your potential clients to decipher what differentiates you from the others and limits ways for you to make your name stand out from the crowd.

Medical practices these days can no longer depend on word-of-mouth to do the bidding for their services. That’s why you need to have a plan in place to attack the market with.

Here are seven reasons why strategic planning in Healthcare is critical.

7 Reasons That Strategic Planning in Healthcare Is Important

What better way to differentiate yourself from the competition than by having a structured plan in place to do so?

Here are 7 reasons why strategic planning is beneficial for your medical practice.

1. Assess What’s Working and What’s Not Working in Your Practice

Today’s independent practices face a host of exciting challenges. The day-to-day demands of running a medical practice can leave little time for a self-assessment.

Building a strategic plan for your business, however, affords you the opportunity to look inward at your office by providing questionnaires to all of your physicians and key staff members.

Hand out “1 to 10” style questions that focus on the mistakes, opportunities, liabilities, improvements, and setbacks they see with the practice.

Performing these questionnaires in a sit-down can also lead to further discussion of the “why” behind their answers, giving you even more defined feedback.

These answers will be critical to building your new business plan, as you’ll integrate ways to enhance the good and improve the bad.

2. Helps You Build a Path

With all the different physicians, nurses, and administrative employees in your practice, it’s hard to get everyone on the same track.

That’s why coming up with a mission statement is so important: It gives your employees a goal to strive for in their everyday jobs.

It also provides a “measuring stick” for whether they’re meeting those goals or not and helps them redirect their work habits to get back on track.

It’s highly unlikely you’ll nail your mission statement on the first try though… Come up with a few rough drafts and then take the next few steps to refine what your end mission statement will be!

3. Refine Your Practice’s Operations

It’s hard to stay caught up when seeing patient-after-patient and setting appointments faster than you can fulfill them.

While that’s a great problem to have from a business perspective, it’s also when the operations side of things can become inefficient and your compliance risk increases.

With the daily hustle and bustle going on, you won’t have time to keep an eye on the transactions as they happen.

Perform an internal assessment of your overall operations, from telephone systems, to locations, billing and coding practice, marketing initiatives, supply costs, transactions, etc.

If your operations aren’t up to par, your reputation will fall by the wayside. installing this internal assessment in a strategic plan will show you where there’s room for improvement in all facets of your medical practice.

4. Scope out the Competition

There are many lessons you can learn from your clients, mentors, and the behemoth companies of your industry. However, the people you can learn the most from is your competition.

How are they attacking the market? where are their patients coming from? what telecommunications do they use? are there any other best practices they use that you can incorporate?

This is also a time to assess current marketplace trends, any needs in the community (such as a flu going around, less fortunate families that need care, etc.), and projections on the marketplace as it pertains to you.

After this phase is complete, you should have a firm idea of what your final mission statement will be.

5. Increase Goal Orientation

Now that you’ve done the research and self-assessment, it’s time to create goals that line up with where you see your medical practice thriving.

Gather your most trusted and loyal employees and leadership for a few sessions to discuss goal setting and their opinions/advice on the goals you have so far.

There should be a healthy mix of long-term and short-term goals, which should also range in specific goals and general goals for each.

A strategic plan will offer you goals that are written out and thought through, which gives your business steps to hit along the way.

6. Track Your Progress

Once you have a strategic plan, you then have a list of goals, missions, and feedback that you can revert to in order to track your progress.

This way, you can meet quarterly to see what improvements have been made and which areas you aren’t living up to.

Granted, these aren’t always easy conversations to have with employees that aren’t meeting expectations, but the strategic plan gives you a list of goals (that were agreed upon by the entire staff) to back up your claim.

7. Easy to Update Your Goals

As the years roll on, the business plan will become outdated due to internal and external changes.

Lucky for you, that doesn’t mean you have to redo the entire business plan. In fact, you only need to update the goals that are no longer relevant.

Without a documented plan you wouldn’t be able to easily fill-and-replace, thus forcing you to run in circles.

Even worse, you risk losing the integrity of the goals you’ve been striving for up to this point.

Unleash the Power of Effective Strategic Planning in Healthcare

Strategic planning in Healthcare is an important piece to the Medical Practice puzzle.

If you’re struggling on where to start or aren’t business-savvy, then have no fear… there’s ways to find help!

Be sure to read up on the different services we offer and which ones may be the best fit for your needs.

For any further questions or inquiries, please call (800)-635-4040 or send an email to [email protected].