Health Care -- Strategic Planning and Marketing

Health Care -- Strategic Planning and Marketing

Strategic planning and marketing often wed customer-oriented issues with broader issues of public health, morality and survival in a highly competitive market. Consequently, a key issue set forth by the American Hospital Association and an issue of strategic planning/marketing are often two sides of the same coin. This work addresses the customer-oriented issues of Diversity and Emergency Planning that are mirrored in two key issues advanced by the AHA. These two issues are articulated in the first part of this work and answered in the second part of this work.

Customer-Oriented Strategic Plan

Diversity

American society is increasingly ethnically diverse due to immigration, relocation, birth rates and other factors. Consequently, a 250-bed community hospital must hone its sensitivity to resulting changes in community health needs. In addition, there is a high level of competition among hospitals that requires sensitive, targeted marketing to attract diverse groups. A very good example of responsive marketing and health care is discussed in A neighborhood of nations by Noonan and Savolaine (Noonan & Savolaine, 2001). The skill and success of that community hospital's plan shows that at least a hybrid of its strategy should be followed for marketing and for capably serving a hospital's community.

Emergency Planning

Though the terrorist attacks of 9/11 awakened the United States from some of its complacency, our public health system and the public/private health departments of the United States still cannot adequately deal with a major bioterrorist attack. Our health care system was not designed to deal with it, our medical personnel are not trained or experienced enough to deal with it and we have not devoted enough political muscle and money to redesigning, re-educating and restructuring so the health care system can effectively deal with this very real menace. The solution is to devote all those assets to new, empowered, well-funded, coordinated health departments and hospitals. In 2002, a multi-disciplinary Symposium on Bioterrorism was held at Harvard University. An important factor cited by these scholars is the limitation of resources that must be devoted to both normal public health care and crises such as bioterrorist attacks (Hamburg, et al., 2002, pp. 125-6). In addition, our healthcare professionals are not commonly well-trained in handling these crises and our infrastructure is so outdated that we might not recognize a bioterrorist attack and might not be able to deal with the crisis on a sustained basis (Hamburg, et al., 2002, pp. 126-7).

Issues or Opportunities

Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities