Health care planning and SWOT analysis for organizational reform

Health care reform has the objective of getting more people insured, and leveraging government bargaining power to lower the cost of health care. Our organization needs to be ready for this. We have the baby boomers joining Medicare, and Medicare is seeking to lower health care costs; so are private insurers. As an organization, we need to bring our costs down in order to remain profitable. This need not be hard -- every other country in the world does it. In this context, streamlining operations, eliminating waste, bargaining with suppliers and finding ways to streamline services to increase customer turnover are all measures that I would undertake in order to ready the organization for the full implementation of health care reform. Eliminating waste is a critical component of maintaining profitability within the health care system (Berwick & Hackbarth, 2012).

Something I would do differently with respect to health care planning is to plan more long-term. There is a sense that I get that there is too much short-term planning, based on quarters and budget cycles, rather than a focus on how to truly adapt the health care system over the long run into something that we all want to see. This is a challenge, for health care management, because sometimes there is conflict between seeking long-term results and short-term, and it can be difficult to invest for the future when struggling to operate efficiently today.

Strategic planning in health care should have a long-term element. In our business, we have the luxury of being able to forecast demand quite accurately. The ACA through that for a loop by insuring another 10 million people -- with more to come -- but in general we understand the demographic trends and we have knowledge of illness, and we also have a pretty good sense of the payer mix going forward. Strategic planning therefore should take into account this reality -- the wildcard is really with respect to capacity management.

Community participation is an interest concept. The community is a stakeholder, and they are the patients. As such, any health care organization will want to focus on meeting the needs of the community. But it is also important that the inmates do not run the asylum -- the community should have a pathway to express its views, but should not have input into actually setting policy. The community can help to define what it wants out of the healthcare system, for example, and its values may be different than what the organization has been focused on (Farmer & Nimegeer, 2014).

I think that to strengthen community planning, one needs to actively engage with the community. This includes not just members of the community who are frequent users of health care, but those who are not, as the latter group represents future customers. We do little community engagement at present, so there is definitely room for more community engagement. A town hall-style meeting is one method that can create a pathway for communication between interested members of the community.