Strategic planning can be defined as a process of influencing the overall vision to achieve an organization’s objectives and then formulating an official method to alter these objectives into outcomes (Russell, 2006). Given that effective strategic plans are formulated and implemented through strategic thinking, every institution should strive to identify and support strategic thinkers among its employees.
Usually, strategic planning involves projecting what is already known in the future. In the past, strategic planning has always been reliant on the conservation and reorganization of conventional categories. Currently, strategic thinkers do not only rely on the conservation and reorganization of conventional categories, but also invent new ones. This article discusses how patient safety goals, data management, and informatics, marketing, and hazards preparedness fits into the strategic plan of an institution.
Numerous healthcare institutions are centered on the development and implementation of strategic plans that improve patients’ wellbeing. These healthcare institutions have formulated patient safety goals they aim to achieve over a specific period (Carroll, 2003). If these goals are attained the safety of the individuals who receive care, treatment, and services in the healthcare institutions will be greatly enhanced.
Patient safety goals fit into an institution’s strategic plan, when the institution formulates ways of influencing the process of attaining these objectives and means to turn these objectives into the desired results. Therefore, patient safety goals cannot be considered strategic if it fails to meet the above conditions.
Information technology has the prospective to transform healthcare. With appropriate data management and informatics, information can be provided, stored, or processed in a timely fashion when and where it is needed. Through this, errors, cost, duplication, and waste in healthcare can be minimized.
Many healthcare institutions aim at improving their data management and informatics systems. With this regard, management and informatics fit to an institution’s strategic plan, if the institution identifies elements to be improved, the decisions it is going to initiate, outlines the process of achieving these improvements with regard to data management and informatics.
The healthcare industry is becoming competitive with each passing year. Every day, new delivery systems and changing marketplace conditions are witnessed (Huber, 2010). Thus, marketing must become an important facet of every healthcare institution. In the past, most healthcare institutions identified their marketing objectives based on thousands of hours of discussions, committee meetings, and analyses conducted at the highest levels of healthcare organizations.
It is disappointing to note that most of these objectives have never been achieved. All health care institutions should integrate their marketing aims into their strategic plans. This can be achieved by identifying the current market situations in the institution, projecting the future marketing situations in the institution, identifying feasible tools to be used in the process, and means to turn these initiatives into the desired results.
Every healthcare institution should have a hazard preparedness plan. They are required to have means of how to respond to disasters. Having a hazard preparedness plan is not only enough in the current age where terrorism threat has increased. Thus, hazard preparedness plan should be strategic.
To achieve this, an institution should have inventories of resources that might be required in an emergency, maintain an ongoing planning process, hold staff orientation on basic response actions, and implement organizations exercise to test the plan. With these initiatives in place, hazards preparedness plan fits into the organization’s strategic plan.
References
Carroll, P. W. (2003). Public health informatics and information systems. New York: Springer.
Huber, D. (2010). Leadership and nursing care management. Maryland Heights, Mo.: Saunders.
Russell, J. (2006). Strategic planning 101. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.