Fundamentals of Strategic Planning for Healthcare Organizations

Book excerpt: A straightforward and practical guidebook, Fundamentals of Strategic Planning for Healthcare Organizations explores the basic principles of planning and maps out key routes for expanding companies in need of specific decision-making procedures. This allows readers to generate their own ideas for developing strategic plans tailored to the individual needs of their companies. The worksheets, client surveys, and other comprehensive planning documents the book provides from actual healthcare organizations are valuable aids to this developmental stage. Fundamentals of Strategic Planning for Healthcare Organizations points the way to implementing a reliable structural framework for effective strategic health care planning. It advocates methods and models that are at once practical and theoretically sound. Presenting each step necessary to the development of a competent strategic plan, this book enables managers in small and large healthcare organizations to maximize performance in any kind of environment. It keeps astride the developments in a rapidly changing industry as it moves beyond strategic plan development to plan implementation, plan evaluation, and plan control. The book's step-by-step approach facilitates systematic analysis of healthcare delivery models and the roles of marketing, communications, and internal and external factors in the planning process. For motivated self-starters striving to steer the course of their organizations in a rapidly changing industry, the book's presentation of the following topics will be beneficial: situation analysis performance objectives setting mission definition strategy selection operational plans development plan management Fundamentals of Strategic Planning for Healthcare Organizations illustrates the practical elements of strategic planning and considers the logic behind them. By doing so, this book acts as both a primer for the novice and a reference source for managers with more experience. Readers will find themselves turning to it again and again for its practical, "hands-on" advice.