Increase Your Medical Practice’s Performance & Productivity with the Right Strategy
Over the years, I have met and worked with literally hundreds of business owners, executives, and entrepreneurs both inside and outside of healthcare. Many of them have written (or have hired others to write) a business plan. But very few of them have ever put much thought into the best strategic plan to achieve their objectives.
Now if you’re thinking “what’s the difference – aren’t a business plan and a strategy the same?” you’re not alone. Most people confuse the two – but having a business plan for your practice does not mean that you have an effective practice strategy.
Business Plan
Business plans are most often drawn up for financial reasons – planning for a new practice start-up, financing a major acquisition like new technology or real estate, or expanding the practice. Since they are often used to inform lenders, partners, and vendors about your practice’s plans for financial performance and growth, they tend to focus on income, cash flow, and balance sheet projections. Once they fulfill their function, they are often put on the shelf and rarely consulted.
While having a good business plan may get you the capital and terms you want, an externally focused business plan does little to ensure the future success of your practice.
The best business plans, however, aren’t just used to provide information about your practice to outsiders, they are also used internally to provide direction to your entire organization. For this kind of plan, you need a well thought out practice strategy.
Strategic Plan
A practice strategy isn’t primarily for outsiders, it’s for you, your partners and everyone on your team.
It directs both the internal operations of your practice as well as any external marketing and promotion activities you do. And most importantly, it helps you make the right decisions about staff hiring and training, new services to offer, and investments of both time and money.
An effective practice strategy starts with goals – where you want your practice to be in 5, 10 or 20 years. This includes the demographic group of patients you will serve, the size of your practice, and the type of care you will deliver.
To develop an effective practice strategy, you not only need to identify your goal, but you must thoroughly evaluate the current state of your practice. This includes your practice’s strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities around you and any threats you face.
When it comes to evaluating strengths, most practice owners take too narrow a view. They tend to focus either on their own specialty training and the credentials of the staff physicians in the practice, or on the equipment or technology the practice has.
A better evaluation comes from taking a broader view. This includes looking at the strengths and capabilities of all staff members, at less obvious resources such as relationships with nearby businesses and organizations, and even at established patient relationships.
The most thorough evaluations include interviews with key staff at all levels. An added benefit of these interviews is that they can reveal previously unrecognized opportunities for your practice.
You also need to evaluate your practices weaknesses and any threats you might face in the foreseeable future. The right strategic plan will overcome or compensate for any weaknesses in your practice by matching strengths to opportunities. It will also help you protect against threats before they sneak up and take you by surprise.
What a Strategic Plan Will Do For You
The goal of the strategic planning process is to come up with the right business model and image for your practice. In other words, how will your practice deliver care and how will you be positioned in the eyes of patients and referral sources?
Once you have the right strategic plan for your practice you are in a much better position to determine the best tactics, or specific actions to take, to achieve your practice goals. You’ll also be better able to build a more effective team, train staff members, design the right policies and procedures, and implement the right marketing and practice promotion tactics.
Most importantly you’ll be able to reduce costs. You won’t invest time and money in activities that aren’t likely to yield the results you want. You’ll be able to operate more efficiently and put systems in place to manage and monitor results, rather than having to manage individuals, revisit decisions, and frequently operate in crisis mode.
With the right strategic plan, you can build a practice as large or small as you want, while maintaining efficiency and high productivity at all staff levels. Your patients benefit from the efficiency, you and your staff benefit from the increased productivity. And isn’t that what operating an exceptional and profitable practice is all about?
No matter what your specialty is, where you practice, whether you have a solo practice, or a large group, the step-by-step system you’ll discover in the the audio seminar How to Position Your Clinical Practice For Outstanding Success will help you craft a winning strategy for your practice.
Excellent articles! Enjoy reading them. Physicians need to start thinking about their practice as a business that needs to be run efficiently and profitably while providing a service that is in keeping with their calling to the noble profession.