For healthcare organizations, developing an effective operational strategy is crucial to thrive in the face of rising costs, changing regulations, technological disruptions and shifting patient demographics. Even a slight crack in your healthcare delivery machinery can hurt your bottom line.
Attempting to build an operational strategy alone is challenging for most healthcare facilities given the complexity of modern healthcare administration. Instead, partnering with specialized consultants like Creatives On Call can help streamline and reduce the risks of this vital undertaking.
Below, we’ll uncover the step-by-step blueprint for achieving operational excellence with a plan tailored to your unique clinical environment and strategic goals. By leaning into partners like Creatives On Call for support, following these steps will set your healthcare organization up for enduring success.
What Is a Healthcare Operational Strategy?
A healthcare operational strategy lays out the specific tactical plans and healthcare operations management initiatives required to realize your overarching organizational vision and objectives. It connects the aspirational with the actionable, bridging the gap between lofty strategic ambitions and on-the-ground workflow realities.
Unlike a strategic plan, which is painted in broad strokes, an operational excellence strategy intricately maps out the core healthcare delivery processes and business operations that enable excellent patient outcomes. The operational strategy also clearly defines metrics to benchmark success, allocates resources and capabilities needed to execute, and outlines an implementation timeline for operational transformation.
With mounting pressure to control healthcare costs, while still delivering superior care quality and patient experience, providers need an operational roadmap guiding day-to-day decisions. An effective operational strategy empowers healthcare organizations to improve coordination, eliminate waste and pivot quickly in response to internal and external changes.
The Link Between Operational Strategy and Marketing Success
An agile operational strategy also unlocks enduring marketing success for healthcare providers. Through transformations guided by Creatives On Call’s operational strategy services, eliminating inefficient workflows and dated information technology (IT) systems opens up budgetary headroom. This streamlining clears data bottlenecks obstructing the advanced marketing analytics and campaigns required to attract patients.
Similarly, investing in digital marketing strategies for healthcare provides invaluable consumer and competitive insights. These insights allow organizations to continuously optimize operational strategies. Creatives On Call delivers full-spectrum operational enhancement and marketing tools that feed into one another, driving a sustainable competitive advantage while helping healthcare organizations reduce costs.
Learn how our healthcare content strategy services can help improve patient engagement and brand reputation.
Why Does Your Healthcare Organization Need an Operational Strategy?
Juggling the moving parts of staffing, facilities, technology, patients, regulations and a web of internal and external stakeholders is a monumental balancing act for healthcare organizations. An operational strategy helps organize the controlled chaos of healthcare delivery, ensuring your organization can nimbly respond to both expected and unexpected challenges.
Here are four crucial benefits that an integrated operational plan provides:
1. Reduces Operational Inefficiencies and Waste
Healthcare waste sucks up valuable resources that could be better spent improving care. An operational strategy helps identify and eliminate bottlenecks in care coordination, administrative tasks, supply chain and billing processes that hamper productivity. Doing so curtails unnecessary healthcare expenditure.
2. Enables Agility in a Dynamic Regulatory Environment
Rules governing Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, medical data, quality reporting as well as privacy and security protocols are constantly in flux. An operational strategy accounts for likely regulatory changes and maps response plans to quickly adapt workflows. This ensures continual compliance and funding.
3. Ensures High-Quality Care and Patient Safety Protocols
Core to any healthcare organization’s mission is keeping patients safe and healthy. An operational strategy aligned to accreditation and care standards helps hardwire safety across clinical and nonclinical operations. Actively monitoring care metrics also allows course correcting should quality dip.
4. Powers Data-Driven Decision-Making
In an environment with countless interdependent variables, guessing the right operational moves is impossible. An operational strategy lays the data infrastructure for robust analytics, forecasting patient demand and modeling the operational impact of investments. Data illuminates the best pathways for enhancing care delivery and financial planning.
Six Steps To Build Your Healthcare Operational Strategy
Constructing a formidable operational strategy requires meticulous planning blended with creative vision. When you partner with Creatives On Call, our operational strategy experts serve as your guide to developing a strategy specially crafted for your organization’s clinical priorities, capabilities and objectives.
These are the steps required to create a robust and efficient strategy:
Step 1: Analyze Internal & External Drivers Impacting Operations
Our operational strategists start by conducting an environmental scan studying pending legislative reforms, public health initiatives, technological innovations, patient population changes and local competitive forces.
We plot how each trend will directly hit different segments of your operations over short- and long-term horizons. The analysis covers clinical departments, supply chain, human resources (HR), IT systems and patient support groups. We then identify which pending developments hold the biggest potential operational impact so you can allot planning resources accordingly.
Step 2: Define Strategic Operational Goals & Objectives
Next, tap Creatives On Call’s strategic planning specialists to clarify the operational outcomes and targets your chosen strategies aim to achieve based on the internal and external dynamics analyzed. We guide healthcare organizations through setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound) goals and metrics across clinical excellence, patient experience, financial health and regulatory compliance domains.
Our healthcare operations experts also assist in drilling down into subgoals for individual departments tailored to your organization’s priorities. For example, we can help define a goal around cutting the average length of stay on a surgical unit by 20% in order to improve capacity.
Step 3: Map Core Clinical & Business Processes
Creatives On Call provides dedicated process excellence specialists who take stock of all the pivotal care delivery and supporting processes that drive your organization. We lead working sessions to catalog details like process flows, inputs, outputs, resources used, dependencies and decision points. Our teams also examine interactions between processes to find problem areas that create delays or miscommunication so these can be fixed later.
Step 4: Identify Gaps Between Future & Current State
Once processes are mapped, Creatives On Call’s strategic advisors analyze where and why your workflows may fail to enable the exceptional patient experience, clinical outcomes and financial performance targets outlined in your goals. We determine root causes like lagging technology, inadequate staff skills, cultural issues or lack of critical data inputs that inhibit processes from reaching desired performance. These gaps form the foundation for transformation.
Step 5: Prioritize Initiatives To Close Gaps
With a laundry list of initiatives to transform operations, deciding where to start can be challenging. Creatives On Call uses multicriteria priority-setting techniques to help organizations systematically rate and rank potential investments based on factors like:
- Patient health impact
- Cost/effort
- Timing with external trends
- Prerequisite constraints
We distill analysis down to the vital few transformational initiatives guaranteed to help achieve strategic goals when resources are limited. Additionally, it’s important to have contingent plans for lower-priority nice-to-have investments should budgets expand.
Step 6: Develop a Detailed Implementation Roadmap
The final step entails detailing precise execution plans for priority initiatives with clearly defined:
- Accountabilities: Who is the executive owner ensuring program success?
- Milestones: What are key interim deliverables and checkpoints to pace progress?
- Resources: What budget, talent, technologies and facilities are required and when?
- Risk management: What risks could derail initiatives and what’s the mitigation plan?
- Timelines: What’s the phased rollout sequence and pace aligned to business requirements?
Creatives On Call contributes extensive program and change management expertise to collaborate on building pragmatic roadmaps tailored to each client’s environment and objectives. Regularly reviewing metrics and monitoring assumptions during implementation allows organizations to respond rapidly to obstacles as they arise. With a sharply crafted roadmap guiding operational transformation, your healthcare organization will possess the capabilities and resilience to excel in the years ahead.
Build a Successful Healthcare Operational Strategy With Creatives On Call
If your healthcare facility is tackling the challenge of transforming clinical and business operations, partnering with specialized consultants can help optimize the process. Creatives On Call offers end-to-end guidance building tailored operational strategies primed for the unique needs of leading hospitals, physician groups, health insurers and life sciences companies.
Our engagement process fuses industry expertise, proven methodologies honed by past client success, and a passion for moving healthcare forward. Key benefits our operational strategy consultants provide include:
- Deep insights into healthcare ecosystem dynamics
- Process optimization finesse
- Change management savvy
- Proven strategic frameworks
- Technology and marketing synergy
The Creatives On Call advantage lies in our holistic yet individually customized problem-solving mindset. We assemble specialized cross-functional teams matching distinctive healthcare operational challenges to niche expert talent.
For example, our healthcare user interface (UI)/user experience (UX) design experts don’t just optimize digital experiences in isolation. They collaborate closely with operations management strategists to envision patient-centric workflows, with marketing teams to enhance brand messaging and with back-end developers to enable process changes through intuitive technology design.
By tapping into the top 1% of collaboratively-minded healthcare strategists, change agents, design thinkers and marketers through our exclusive team, we help leading healthcare companies take a connected approach to building sophisticated operational engines. This interconnected team strategy powers the next decade of transformative growth by tying world-class patient experience design to operational transformations to data-driven marketing solutions.
Connect with us to learn more.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are operational strategies in healthcare?
Operational strategies in healthcare are plans and actions aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery. These strategies involve optimizing areas of healthcare operations like patient flow, staff allocation, technology integration and resource management to enhance patient care, reduce costs and improve overall organizational performance.
How long does it take to build an operational strategy?
The time it takes to construct a detailed operational strategy depends on the complexity of organizational processes that require mapping, as well as the number of priority initiatives that require overhaul. This can take anywhere from a few weeks to several months.
