Competitive advantage in business strategy

Strategic Planning for a Competitive Advantage in Health Care

Strategic planning is essential for healthcare managers in maintaining high quality and cost effective healthcare in a competitive market. Planning techniques are vital in establishing a sustainable completive advantage. A successful healthcare manager must formulate a concise but comprehensive plan to take inventory of available resources, to discern the strengths, improves on the weakness, and establishes a plan that effectively prioritizes them. The resource-based management tool can be utilized to assist managers in assessing the value of available resources to gain a competitive advantage within their market. Resources in a healthcare organization can include such things as tangible assets, employee capabilities, organizational structures or information processes. The value of a product or service has three qualifiers are rareness, imitability, and sustainability. This paper will briefly introduce value and the three qualifiers of key resources, and offer an opinion as to which is the most helpful in contributing to an above-average, long-term, and sustainable competitive advantage.

In healthcare, a resource would be considered valuable if it enable the organization to offer its customers a product that has measurable worth in comparison to other available services. Additionally, a resource is valuable when it offers investors and other benefactor the prospect of increased value or return on their investment. As value resources increase and non-valuable resources or identifiable weaknesses decrease, the sustainability of the competitive edge enhanced. To be valuable, a resource must have a degree and combination of rarity, imitability, and non-substitutable.

A healthcare resource is rare if the organization can offer a service or product, to both benefactors and beneficiaries, that it more difficult to obtain elsewhere then the resource they offer increases in value giving the company a competitive advantage. The imitability of a valuable resource refers to the ability of another organization to imitate the resource. If a healthcare organization has a product or service that is inimitable then that resource increases in value because they would, in essence, have control over that product. Another important quality for valuable resources to possess is a lack of substitutability. This means that the resource, although it may be valuable, rare, and unable to be imitated, must not exchangeable for another product or service. A resource that is indispensible and unable to be substituted is highly desirable for a company that seeks to be competitive (Barney, 1991).

I propose that this tool is the most valuable when a balance is sought in the four value-related-qualities identified above. Each of the four identifiers is equally useful in theory and that one or more may take priority in any given application. The challenge for the manager is to catalogue available resources, identify their strengths, weaknesses, and valuableness using tools such as the resource-base management approach and then using the outcome of the research to formulate a customized plan to balance and sustain the value of the collection of available resources. If a healthcare organization has a rare resource, such as a highly qualified physician or a piece of cutting edge equipment, but these things can be imitated or substituted by the competing providers than the competitive advantage becomes at risk.