Does Your Practice Have a Strategic Plan? (Why You Need It + How to Write One)
Running a successful medical practice involves a long list of components. In addition to actual patient care, there’s administrative work, insurance claims processing, and billing. Add to that patient support, marketing, and follow up consultations. It’s a full plate — enough to make it tempting to do what needs to get done right now, while putting everything else on the back burner.
Such can be the case with developing a healthcare strategic plan. Sure, you want to scale, but it doesn’t need to happen today, so pencil it in for later. Before you move on to the next task, take a minute to consider this further. At the end of the day, having a plan in place is what will ensure that you move in the direction you want to go — and that you have a tangible way to track progress.
What is a Healthcare Strategic Plan?
A healthcare strategic plan is an established process used to determine what are your practice’s goals, procedures to meet them, and the steps to take along the way to ensure that you’re on the right track.
While you can certainly implement short-term goals, the focus is on long-term planning, with specific milestones at certain intervals.
7 Benefits of Healthcare Strategic Planning
While it’s common sense to simply think that you want to gradually grow your practice, establishing a healthcare strategic plan means creating a blueprint with actionable steps for each stage of your growth. In doing so, everyone involved within your organization will reap the benefits, including:
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Streamlined Processes
Establishing standard procedures ensures consistency and everyone on your team being aware of what to do and when to do it. It eliminates wasted time and resources going back and forth trying to figure out what to do or who’s in charge of doing what.
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Better Communications
When you have processes for all elements of your practice, you eliminate the guesswork. It also ensures that each department knows how other departments conduct their own tasks, which better helps them align to work like a well-oiled machine.
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Predictive Analytics
An essential part of having a strategic plan means using software that tracks your key performance indicators (KPIs). What these are may vary depending on your specific goals. For example, attracting more website traffic, engaging more users on social media, patient referrals, and determining whether you’ll have a surge in appointments during certain times of the year. By tracking past performance, identifying insights, and acting accordingly, you’ll be in a better position to gauge what is likely to happen next.
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A Better Patient Experience
When you establish processes, train your team adequately, and provide your staff with the right tools and resources, a natural consequence is that patients will have a better experience as they interact with your practice — ease of scheduling, reduced wait times, efficient claims processing, timely follow-ups, appointment reminders, efficient customer care, etc.
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Employee Retention
Employees are more likely to stay at a position where they are supported and provided with all of the tools they need to do their job. This includes planning for a large enough staff for busy times of the year, using software that is easy to use, and knowing where to find SOPs for any tasks they may be unfamiliar with. This makes it infinitely easier for them to conduct their responsibilities effectively.
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Brand Awareness
Every long-term success plan incorporates marketing best practices. Developing buyer personas (in a medical practice’s case, this means identifying the patients you wish to attract), creating content that addresses their questions, and ads, where they can find them, is a great starting point. Combine this with word-of-mouth marketing from the excellent patient experience and it’s only a matter of time before your target audience starts recognizing your brand.
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Patient Retention
When you’re intentional about making things better for your patients, they notice. And while quality care should always be paramount, so is a commitment to valuing their time, addressing their concerns, and making them feel that every single time they engage with your practice, they are the most important thing at that very moment. And none of this happens by chance. It’s all the result of well-executed strategic planning.
How to Develop a Medical Practice Strategic Plan
Now that you’re aware of all of the advantages of making strategic planning a priority, let’s take a look at how to create one for your own practice.
Develop Your Mission and Vision
This sounds cliché, but organizations do this for a reason. Why did you start your practice? How do you want patients to feel? What do you want to be known for? That’s your mission and should be the guiding principle in everything you do.
By the same token, your vision focuses on how you want to move forward. Is your goal to be the leading oncology practice in your area? Is it to be a pediatric dentistry clinic that’s accessible to all income brackets? Even if you move the goalposts, you want to have something to aim for.
Establish Your Core Values
What are the characteristics you believe are most important when running your practice? This could be anything that fosters a sense of trust (e.g. transparency, proactivity, integrity). Or it could be diversity and inclusion (e.g. ensuring you have people from different races, cultures, and backgrounds in leadership positions). What do you want your practice to be known for? Base your core values on that.
Prioritize Your Goals
Every organization has goals; but not all of them are equally important. For example, if your main objective is to aid underserved communities, you can start to develop ways to liaise with nonprofits, pro bono clinics, charities, and other community groups who share the same purpose. If you want your practice to be known for medical research, look for ways to work with clinical research scientists. If you want to be known as a practice with extraordinary patient care, look into the resources that will enable you to do so — such as a customer portal, healthcare CRM, employee training, etc.
Develop Action Plans
Once you’ve established your practice’s priorities, it’s time to make a list of actionable steps for how to get there. Identify who’s going to be in charge of what. Institute a budget. Establish milestones and deadlines for each of them. And make sure that everything aligns with your core values. For example, if one of them is transparency, keep everyone involved notified of what’s going on and how to communicate with you in the event of any hiccups or concerns.
Track Analytics
Change requires a common goal, everyone rowing in the same direction, and consistency. But since it happens so gradually, you need a way to gauge whether you’re moving the needle. Use software that enables you to create dashboards that reflect the metrics that are important to you. Depending on your goals, this could be marketing metrics, such as patient acquisition costs; or patient satisfaction metrics, such as average wait time; or total monthly revenue, or days each claim spends in accounts receivable. Doing so will help you identify what’s working and what needs to be modified.
Streamline Your Billing Processes for More Efficient Practice Management
At Holistic Billing Service, we’ve been assisting chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage therapy practices for over two decades. We are the nation’s largest billing provider for holistic healthcare, serving more than 2,500 practices across the United States.
By partnering with an experienced medical billing team, you can spend less time thinking about managing CPT coding and insurance claims, and more time scaling your practice and delivering high-quality care to your patients.
Contact us so that we can create a custom solution that aligns best with your practice’s needs.
