We recently received the following question from a registered attendee during our ACHE Cluster session, Strategic Planning from Formulation to Action, in San Antonio: When you seek board approval of a strategic plan, what are they actually approving (the whole plan, organizational direction, goals, initiatives)? Our firm advocates that the board play an active role […]
Veralon Views Blog
The Veralon Views blog is an extension of our partnership with leaders who are transforming the healthcare industry. Here, we share expert perspectives from our nationally recognized senior consulting team on issues that are key to the success of your organization.
After carefully and thoughtfully selecting your organization’s critical planning issues (CPIs), the next step in your planning process is to move directly into goal setting. Goals will serve as the general ends toward which future efforts are directed for a particular CPI. In other words, all of the actions that take place under the umbrella […]
The complexity of the health care environment calls for our organizations to do business in a different way, challenging our ability and flexibility to remain nimble and effectively address internal and external demands; in short, it requires us to change. At the outset of the strategic planning process, it’s important for leaders to have a […]
A common pitfall in strategy formulation phase of strategic planning comes from trying to accomplish too much at once: laying out each and every issue that the organization faces or has faced in the past, and trying to address all of them in one fell swoop. This approach leads to an overwhelming amount of tasks […]
The strategic planning process requires a significant investment of time, effort, and resources to prepare for the future, yet health care organizations’ planning efforts do not always produce desirable results. The following four factors are commonly linked to failed strategic plans: Loss of energy and focus Lack of management Disconnect from operations Lack of resources […]
Health care organizations today are continually faced with competing priorities for resource allocation. As the old adage goes, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” and most often, the squeaky wheel is an operational or infrastructure priority, such as technology demands, FTE needs (vs. workforce development), facility improvement (vs. strategic facility planning), budgets, marketing, department-and specific […]
As discussed in our organizational direction post, a vision statement is an image of the future that an organization seeks to create—or rather, what the organization wants to be in the future. While establishing a vision is a critical component of strategic planning, it does not address howan organization will realize its desired future state. […]
Identifying your organizational direction is a key activity within any strategic planning process. The components of organizational direction describe your hospital or system’s reason for existence and frames where you wish to be in the future. In our era of market instability and post-reform adjustment, organizational direction can help provide the clarity your system needs […]
Strategic planning for health care organizations is more important than ever before given the uncertainties about health care reform and rapidly changing market dynamics. In the past, strategic plans have been used to identify growth opportunities and prioritize capital needs; however, in the post-reform era, growth does not necessarily mean expansion, but rather integrating high-quality […]
At a recent ACHE cluster, the question was asked “How do you match your organization’s investments in innovation and integration [to meet imperatives of health reform, industry transformation] with the state of development and pace of change in your specific market?” It is critical to synchronize how fast and in what way your organization pursues […]