5 Key Areas of Focus when Assessing Physician Need and Alignment Strategies

What health system doesn’t have physician recruitment, integration and alignment at the top of their strategic priorities? Market competition, pipeline shortages, failing practice economics and a growing recognition that they can’t achieve quality and financial goals without physicians at the table, have organizations jockeying to win the race for physician integration and commitment.

A well-planned approach requires superb strategic thinking about possible, probable and preferred futures, and a well-crafted plan to bring vision into reality. The process will be better informed through an analysis about the current state of physicians in the marketplace and how that is likely to change in the future.

However, data is just data unless you use it strategically. 5Rs™ provides a framework and methodology in which to discover and calculate opportunities:

1. Recruitment — Recruitment strategies address physician shortages when both strategic and community assessments indicate a need for physicians in a particular specialty
2. Retention — Top producing physicians are candidates for retention strategies based upon historic commitment of activity to the hospital for inpatient and outpatient service volumes
3. Redirection — Physician candidates for redirection strategies are typically those aligned with competitor hospitals.
4. Redeployment — The goal is to increase practice volumes through better geographic location of the practice or through the presence of multiple practice sites
5. Retirement — Transition planning should be considered for top producing physicians over the age of 55.

Insights from this analysis will launch health systems out of the starting gate and into the field by producing a focused set of tactics to support the overall physician engagement strategy.

Karen Corrigan

Advanced Service Line Marketing for Orthopedics

Tomorrow, August 18, 2009, Bill Munley, vice president for professional services and orthopedics at Bon Secours St. Francis in Greenville, SC, will be joining me on a HealthLeaders Media Webcast - "Advanced Service Line Marketing: New Orthopedics Growth Strategies." During this session, we'll talk about trends influencing demand for orthopedics and explore three key initiatives that Bon Secours has undertaken to drive volume and revenue in this category. The session begins at 1:00 p.m. eastern on Tuesday, 8/18. HealthLeaders Media senior managing editor Gienna Shaw will moderate. To hear a brief interview that Bill and I did with with Gienna, click here.

Karen Corrigan

Rapidly Restructuring Healthcare Markets Require New Approaches to Brand Management

Ever more complex health system structures, physician relationships, expanding clinical portfolios, new business ventures and expansion into new markets require a proactive, focused and purposeful plan to build and leverage brand equity across the enterprise – across geography – across constituencies.

Today, health systems’ approaches to branding must evolve to address and manage the complexities of:

• Hospital and health system mergers & acquisitions
• Physician integration, joint ventures and owned medical practices
• Ambulatory, post acute and retail diversification
• Academic, technology and business partnerships
• Multi-market, multi-state expansion initiatives
• Enterprise IT/EHR/Website strategies
• Co-branding/co-marketing relationships

This requires more sophisticated methods for determining, managing, and building brand portfolios in diversified health systems, addressing multiple facilities, strategic business units, markets, physician integration, and partnering ventures. Because at the end of the day, the objective isn’t what to call something, it’s market leverage.

Karen Corrigan

Is Service Line Success Embedded in Design or Execution: Part 2

The following is a continuation of an earlier posting.

The Disconnect Between Strategy and Service Line Structure

At the risk of boring repetition, structure should follow strategy. There is no universal ‘right’ way -- or ‘wrong’ way, except perhaps blind restructuring of clinical services into service lines without a defined strategy as to how value will be created and what capabilities and resources must be brought to bear effective execution.

Strategy then is not just an aggregation of tactics, but a leadership-driven approach to articulating a futuristic vision for how a service line intends to compete. To get to this point, health systems must develop a point of view as to how the market is likely to unfold, identify specific strategies to create a distinct and compelling market position and then create a business model and structure to effect achievement of its goals.

In its generic form, the product line and brand management models developed by industry leaders such as Proctor and Gamble and GE, are useful frameworks for designing an approach to service line leadership with the fundamental intent of optimizing the organization’s market position for a defined service line.

There may be more to learn today from the product or brand management models that evolved in the consumer goods and services industries as we address increasing consumer influence in the selection, purchase and use of health services and products. However, to be receptive to the advantages offered by brand management models, we must suspend the predominant notion about brands as communication devices and adopt an understanding of brand as the totality of customer experience resulting from organizational decisions regarding positioning, design, development and delivery of products and services.

Fundamental differences are realized across key factors. Part III will compare and contrast healthcare’s service line model with industry’s product or brand management model.

Join the discussion. What do you believe to be the key strengths and pitfalls of service line management models?

Karen Corrigan

Is Service Line Success Embedded in Design or Execution? Part 1

The popularity of service line management has waxed and waned over the past two and a half decades. This can be attributed to a number of factors ranging from the changing nature of competition in the health industry to misalignment of internal resources to variations in clinical practice to mixed financial results.

Since its origin in the early 1980s, much has been debated about the structure, strategy and capabilities resident in service line organizations. In general the service line business model has evolved from service line marketing to clinical program operations to a more systematic approach of managing a defined line of business delivering a bundle of services to distinct market segments.

In practice, however, service line models differ widely across health systems and hospitals – and with varying results. Not all service line marketing models failed in the 1990s; not all integrated service line business models work today.The key question to explore is “what” creates success – the model itself or superior execution of a service line strategy.

In coming posts, I'll compare and contrast the various aspects of design and leadership. Please join the discussion.