Strategic Management of Healthcare Strategic

Strategic Management of Healthcare

Strategic Management in Healthcare

It is common to see residential clinics spin off from larger regional hospitals that have multiple areas of expertise and a depth of treatment programs. In the case of the residential clinic that serves as the basis of this analysis, the threats of demographic, environmental, economic and government-based are analyzed in this paper.

Analysis of Risks

Beginning with the demographic risks to this clinic, the median age of patients varies from the very yo0jng and children to those who are past 65 years of age. The clinic's two busiest physicians work with young families and children who have the common childhood diseases and the older patients who are 65 years of age or older. The threat of this from a demographic standpoint is being able to sustain quality of care levels consistently across the spectrum of patients, which is a common threat as clinics expand in service coverage (Edmund, 2010).

The economic threat is one that is centered on the use of insurance and employer-provided and government-provided healthcare for the majority of patients. The single greatest threat to healthcare providers is the lack of clarity and consistency on payments and government subsidies of healthcare (Navarro-Espigares, Torres, 2011). This threat is significant in that it can quickly affect how the clinic operates and to what extent it recruits new physicians to handle the higher patient workloads with children and the geriatric patients 65 years of age and older. The economic factors of Medicare and Medicaid, as they account for nearly 35% of all reimbursements and also require a coordinated fulfillment process at the clinic and hospital level, are another major economic factor influencing healthcare providers today (Huang, Liu, 2011).

The environmental factors of increased government regulation and forced compliance including HIPAA reporting and data storage standards (Huang, Liu, 2011) and quality assurance being measured and reported (Edmund, 2010) has made compliance one of the most expensive aspects of running a healthcare clinic today. These environmental factors of patients' rights with regard to reporting their medical histories, allowing them to review them, and also ensuring they are archived to HIPAA standards are all risks for the clinic as well (Huang, Liu, 2011).