Week 3 Discussion_Strategic Plan

Week 3 Discussion_Strategic Plan

2 peer responses to Group A and Group E. They are posted below.

 Peer responses By Day 7

Individually respond to at least two other teams in one or more of the following ways:

• Provide recommendations for another team’s content.
• Offer insights on how your team’s content supports another team’s content.

Group E, Week 3 Discussion

In the scenario presented regarding Millersville Regional Medical Center with a strategic plan requiring an evaluation, there are certain factors and components that need to be considered (Ginter, Duncan & Swayne, 2018). In the process of, the center needs to apply strategic controls, which are some of the factors to consider when looking at the center’s ability to optimize its strengths and opportunities. Premise control is used in order to help measure and determine outside environmental factors and this strategy can potentially be used in order to help the health care organization when it comes to determining influx of immigrants in the surrounding area (Clear Point Strategy, n.d.).  For example, the center’s ability to recruit more physicians and also retain the current workforce in the face of competition and better alternatives such as better pay and amenities for its workforce from its competitors.

Also, implementation control could possibly be used in order to help create and track an overall plan that can be used in order to help decrease wait times, increase funds, as well as increase the number of health care professionals.  It is because, at the implementation of the strategic plan, the center needs to ensure that in the event of unforeseen circumstances like the influx of patients, the strategic plan will not need any adjustments. These adjustments, in most cases, are costly, time-consuming, and may trigger loss of clients to competitors.

Week 3 Discussion_Strategic Plan

The third strategic control the organization should utilize is the special alert control. “A special alert control is the need to thoroughly, and often rapidly, reconsider the firm’s basis strategy based on a sudden, unexpected event” (Strategic Control, 2018). This strategic control would benefit the organization because the organization has seen an unexpected spike in the number of patients that visits the hospital.

It is vital for every strategic plan, even at its time of evaluation to put in place some monitoring tools. In this case of Millersville Regional Center, a monitoring tool such as the Gantt Chart, which is a bar chart used to monitor and show a project plan and its advancement or progress over time, is crucial in its strategy. It is because, in the moment of monitoring progress, the center would have set appropriate measures to prevent the depletion of its charitable care budget early in the year. The use of a balanced scorecard is essential because of its purpose in tracking and isolating four separate areas, also known as legs. These legs include learning and growing, business processes, customers, and finance (Cebeci, 2018). In the scenario, the strategic plan needs this tool to evaluate the center’s ability and capacity to handle some issues. These issues include the increase of patients, better pay, and amenities for its workforce through available resources. It will give the center an idea of where immediate or critical improvements are required or the need for additional resources. A dashboard would also help the center to focus on its mission and ensure that its strategy is effective.

Week 3 Discussion_Strategic Plan

Two tactical objectives the organization can use to address its operations requirements are to reach out to the nearest universities to create connections with nursing and healthcare students so that they may find interest in becoming employed at the facility when they graduate. By networking, the hospital can establish connections while also making students aware of the overall benefit of using their talents in rural communities. Another tactical objective the hospital should consider is involving staff members with their input on creative and innovative ways to improve the quality care and rewarding the employees for their involvement. Regardless of job title, all staff members may have ideas that could benefit the organization. Including staff also shows them that the organization cares about them and their ideas regarding the company.

References

Klipfolio. 2001. What is a data dashboard? Retrieved from https://www.klipfolio.com/resources/articles/what-is-data-dashboard

Strategic Control. 2018. Strategic Management: Formulation and Implementation. Retrieved from https://www.strategic-control.24xls.com/en143

S. Epstein. September 2013. Using the Internet in Your Job Search. Retrieved from https://career.fsu.edu/sites/g/files/imported/storage/original/application/27ba368e3cba4cc02d2931a2be2f4f3d.pdf

Clear Point Strategy. (n.d). Strategic control: Breaking down the process and techniques.Retrieved from https://www.clearpointstrategy.com/strategic-control-process/

Cebeci, U. (2018). Building hospital balanced scorecard by using decision support approach. IIOAB JOURNAL, 9(6), 42-47.

Ginter, P. M., Duncan, W. J., & Swayne, L. E. (2018). The strategic management of health care organizations. John Wiley & Sons.

Group A Week 3 Discussion

Scenario:

The board of directors of Elite Healthcare formulated and implemented a strategic plan to address the city’s rapidly growing population (11% increase per month), which is demanding greater access to quality, innovative patient care. However, they failed to evaluate the implementation of the plan, and over time, many employees became overworked because of the increased demand for services, which has led to a higher percentage of work-related employee and patient injuries. The current work environment has adversely impacted employee morale and the organization’s ability to recruit new talent. Moreover, patients have started seeking care across town even though it is a much longer commute

Strategic controls, monitoring tools, and tactical objectives might be used to address date and tracking via medical records.  As an organization using tolls to monitor data from medical claims, pharmacy claims, and electronic medical records can impact millions of lives. Strategically leveraging this data to hone and train predictive models for population health management, fostering innovation and research across health care will also be impactful.  Although the size of the data assets would be impressive, it’s the enrichment and curation that makes most valuable to the health care industry. Also, there will be fewer negative consequences with expressed objectives and goals. Organizations are built with the goal of profitability through processes in mind. The organizational control approach incorporates goals and the strategy used to reach them.

Week 3 Discussion_Strategic Plan

As far as tactical objectives to leverage operational requirements the organization should revamp the scheduling process on the front line. Offer and request should be taken into consideration in scheduling surgeries and other non-life-threatening processes. Patients should be planned for such processes on days when owing to a busy night in the ED, the hospital is less likely to have a spike in patient volume. Consider alternative care delivery techniques. The organization can attempt to treat patients in different ways to alleviate the burden of heavy wait times. For patients with less severe problems with ED, telemedicine may be one option. The organization can also partner directly with neighboring emergency medical centers and other healthcare institutions to provide patients with an option for ED to reduce their waiting time. Incorporate the preferences of patients. Patients, not providers, should be the focus of scheduling. The organization must, therefore, reach out to find out what types of modifications would best suit the requirements of patients. Some clinics have provided patients with access to schemes where they can create their own ED appointments for less critical problems –or offer patients an estimated time to wait over the phone before arrival so they can make the appropriate arrangements. (White, 2015) These solutions should help with accommodating the imbalance of supply and demand that the organization is facing.

Monitoring tools used are data-driven tools, Epic, and good old fashion workgroups and meetings. We have weekly meetings with our vendor to ensure that the project is up to speed and this issue is being worked through. Monitoring this is no easy task but through communication and a strong project plan, we get it done. We rely on the data from the groups and their feedback to drive our conversations and push us.

Week 3 Discussion_Strategic Plan

In addition, we will use a balanced scorecard to align the daily work of all employees with the strategic plan aimed at increasing access to quality care and measure progress towards our strategic target (Walston, 2018). Taking the organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses into account, our objective of delivering quality care will lead us to the tactical goal of matching a reasonable patient-provider ratio that will prevent employee burnout. The balanced the scorecard will, at all times, help keep the patient-provider ratio proportionate to that determined in the strategic plan; a ratio that will prevent excessive workloads and employee burnouts.

One tactic used is meeting the NCQA standards for the health risk assessment to ensure that our organization meets the guidelines and requirements for reimbursements and the standards of care.  This is a necessary objective for all parties involved.

Another objective is weekly meetings to ensure that no other issues will arise and the project is on track. To me, nothing beats good old-fashioned meetings and face-to-face conversation. Meeting weekly increases the amount of communication and ensures that the project will get done. To me, this is very necessary and one of the strongest tasks. We go over project plans, updates, questions, concerns, and the timeline. We all count on this meeting to get our product done. Behrouzi, Shaharoun, and Ma’aram note this in their piece as a useful measure (Behrouzi, F., Shaharoun, A. M., & Ma’aram, A., 2014).

Diving deeper, an example within the workplace comes from work in an ICU as a respiratory therapist. One employee noticed that the balloon cuff on are vented patients was deflating between shifts causing patients not to get the exact volume they need to keep their lungs open while they were on the ventilator. Of course, this drives the nurses crazy when the ventilator is alarming. So the employees came up with a plan to do cuff checks at the beginning and end of our shifts.  Employees would check all patients that were vented at the end of the month as our milestone review and notice deflation was down. This allows vented patients to get the volume they needed to get their lungs healthier until they come off the ventilator.

Week 3 Discussion_Strategic Plan

Stepping further, with monitoring tools, these employees used a data dashboard tool to analyze the data from doing the cuff checks. They could track the average time when deflation started, average pressure that stayed in the cuff and us used that data to help to keep accurate pressure in the cuffs for our vented patients.

References

Walston, S. L. (2018). Strategic healthcare management: Planning and execution (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: Health Administration.

Chapter 15, “Implementing, Monitoring, and Evaluating Strategy” (pp. 339-353)

Behrouzi, F., Shaharoun, A. M., & Ma’aram, A. (2014). Applications of the balanced scorecard for strategic management and performance measurement in the health sector. Australian Health Review, 38(2), 208–217.

Jakob Lauring, Jan Selmer and Annamaria Kubovcikova, Personality in context: effective traits for expatriate managers at different levels, The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 10.1080/09585192.2017.1381137, 30, 6, (1010-1035), (2017)

White, J. (July 6, 2015). 4 keys to reducing patient wait times. https://www.healthcarebusinesstech.com/reduce-patient-wait-times/ 

SAMPLE ANSWER

Group E, Week 3 Discussion

Having a strategic plan for a healthcare institution has become very imperative with the changing healthcare needs. Therefore, it is important for every healthcare institution to have its strategic plan for the future to ensure its success. A strategic plan helps the organization plan for the unknown. This is important to ensure that the healthcare organization can be able to deal with whatever may come along the way that was not expected. One of the most important consideration that needs to be done and planned for is financial requirements for running the organization. An organization should have objectives as well as goals that have been set to be achieved. In order to measure the implementation and success of the set goals, it is important to have a strategic plan. As you have mentioned, it is important for the healthcare organization to have a dashboard that would measure its performance overtime. The dashboard will help in evaluating which areas that may require improvement and which areas that needs to be maintained at the same level. Having a dashboard and a reward system within the healthcare organization can help in improving the efficiency of the organization.

Reference

Strategic Planning in Hospitals. Retrieved from https://www.stratadecision.com/healthcare-and-hospital-strategic-planning/

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Group A Week 3 Discussion

Strategic management is an important management practice in healthcare institutions. Nowadays, in order to achieve improved quality of health services, it is important to set a plan for the future by establishing sustainable processes through a strategic plan. A strategic plan outlines how an organization aims to progress from the current situation to the desire future situation. For the current case, it was important for the board of directors to have done a thorough strategic plan that could have helped them avoid the problems they are currently facing. This would have saved resources as well as costs that can be used to expand the facility. Due to the current situation, the quality of healthcare has been affected leading to patients seeking healthcare services elsewhere. It is important to look at the broad picture while making a strategic plan. This can help in identifying all the elements that can affect positively or negatively a healthcare organization in the future. Hospital performance evaluation is very important in order to determine the performance over time. This in turn would help in the development of a strategic plan.

Week 3 Discussion_Strategic Plan

Reference

Sadeghifar, J., Jafari, M., Tofighi, S., Ravaghi, H and Maleki M. (2015). Strategic Planning, Implementation, and Evaluation Processes in Hospital Systems: A Survey from Iran. Glob J Health Sci, 7(2): 56–65.

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