- BHA FPX 4104 Assessment 2 Strategic Analysis and Operational Considerations.
Strategic Analysis and Operational Considerations
Strategic analysis is a system for making health care decisions that consider the internal and external environments of a company. Whereas operational issues put the translated theoretical principles into easily observable practices that ensure that they work on a day-to-day basis, competition, resources, and market considerations are reviewed. The healthcare sector must adapt to new circumstances, use all resources to the maximon level, and improve the quality of the work with the patients (Zio, 2022).
Some of the possible ways that healthcare companies can achieve these goals in an uncertain environment are highlighted below with the help of the concepts of strategic analysis and business operations that are important for sensible and long-term management. In the strategic planning of a healthcare organization, it is important to consider the internal factors as well as the external factors( Berhe et al., 2019).
This paper explains how St. Antony Main Medical Centre has been a subject of competition in the healthcare business. To evaluate the extent of the operational issues, the business will employ the examination of the internal and outside environments. In a healthcare market that is becoming progressively competitive, organizations must understand their main competitors. Healthcare has changed, and there is new competition that the Minneapolis-based St. Antony Main Medical Centre owned by Villa has to contend with (Dash et al., 2019).
That being the case, some strategic tools such as the business environment analysis using the SWOT analysis and Porter’s Five Forces might be of value in the evaluation of the company based on the dynamic nature of the sector in which the business operates. It may pose a problem to the St. Antony Main Medical Centre’s ability to grow, compete, and respond to market fluctuations if these frameworks are not observed.
Impact and Importance of Understanding Competition
A new for-profit acute care hospital of 50 beds is planned to be established at the St. Antony Main Medical Centre in Minneapolis owned by Vila. For one to prepare well for the future, he or she must understand competition in health care delivery. This rivalry requires analysis because it affects several segments of the business operation. Some of these are Children Medical Centre, Redeemer Health and Rehab, Benedictine Health Centre, Greenway Surgery Centre, and many more, let alone those that have newly entered the market.
Several among these include Ebenezer Care Centre and Golden Living Centre nursing homes that offer a wide scope of services in the zone. Pressure in patient care is established from interviews with George Fink and other hospital officials of St. Antony Medical Centre. When hospitals are competing to shift toward a mere selling of services, this becomes clear from the ever-lengthening waiting times for imaging as well as rehabilitation services that patients endure.
Troy Holland thus helped the audience point at congestion in the ED as an instance of how work competition pervades each phase of the patient experience. Harold Liss Vice President of Medical Services talks about the challenges of recruiting doctors, there are four general openings for doctors, and the competition is keen, they exist for thyroid disorders and injuries to the head.
The skilled worker situation and the inability of the hospital to recruit a third-shift generalist raises questions about the hospital’s competitiveness in the labor market (Schreiner, 2022). Those operating concerns brought about by the lack of a sufficient number of beds resulting in patient delay are discussed by Mary Mills, Nurse Manager at Med-Surg. An example of how competition affects organizational performance is the fact that there is increased local saturation of rehab centers, and nursing homes, which exacerbates the problem.
BHA FPX 4104 Assessment 2 Strategic Analysis and Operational Considerations
To develop a good strategy it is also necessary to understand the challenges caused by the competition; so, St. Antony Main Medical Centre has to assess its strong and weak points. The suggestions may allow you to keep or even enhance the competitive edge in the areas of service delivery, resource management, and staff recruitment. As commented by Schofield et al. (2019), it is possible to better address the issues of the interviewees by adopting more patient-focused methods after the completion of the competitive analysis.
Regarding the objectification of patient-centered strategies, it is expected that, when conventional facilities are fully implemented, the most important goals should be: to improve the quality of the emergency treatment; to reduce waiting times; to investigate potential synergies. To be ready for the future, something must be done; it is necessary to invest money and to look for new people to employ. Thus, the current pay structure should be revised and possible incentives should be introduced, mainly the hospital should pay priority to some medical specializations in order to attract and maintain good doctors in the present competitive healthcare sector.
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Alternatives for Competition
As we already have noted if St. Antony Main Medical Centre needs a competitive advantage in Kenya it might establish specialty centers of excellence, for instance, orthopedics, cardiology, or cancer. This involves inviting professional persons in the area, some pounds being spent on costly equipment, and making sure that employees are well trained in those specific service lines not offered by rival firms (Schofield et al., 2019).
St. Antony needs to draw in such patients from the neighboring regions who would require their specialized services; these aspects of the services offered can be publicized through advertising and partnerships with doctors. If managed diligently, St. Antony might set up the idea of being a preeminent supplier of complex care, which differentiates it from other competitors. This strategy is consistent with the organization’s short-term and long-term strategic plans that seek to build the hospital to become a leading healthcare institution in terms of specialty care provision in the region.
Healthcare Organization Strategic Frameworks
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SWOT Analysis
Thus, because of emerging new competitors, St. Antony Main Medical Centre needs firm guidelines that would help to control the competitive environment in which the company operates. However, to make a future analysis it is better to do a SWOT analysis which stands for the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, outside opportunities, and threats of the organization (Deshpande, 2019).
SWOT is applied by St. Antony Main Medical Centre to position the healthcare organization and respond to opportunities and threats in the competitive environment (Giusti et al., 2020). The proposed 50-bed hospital may then facilitate its service improvements and challenges to be pointed out. It is easy for the organization to proactively strategize on how it will leverage opportunities, defend itself from competition, strengthen its weaknesses, and control threats if it is fully aware of them.
Pros and Cons
However, SWOT analysis being a valid tool for strategic planning, St. Antony may miss some of the nuances of the competitive interactions if it overemphasizes this cross-table too much. The conventional SWOT technique in the form it is being presented here generates a current snapshot of internal and external factors.
However it doesn’t give a structured approach to use the ideas for checking activities periodically to find out whether any new rivals emerged, new services appeared, or some breakthrough technologies appeared. When doing that it might prove beneficial to use some techniques and SWOT analysis could be one of them. However, it should be also pointed out that further and ongoing competitive analysis is vital to define some specific service deficiencies, new patient demands, and other partnership prospects.
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Porter’s Five Forces
Incorporated with SWOT analysis, Porter’s five forces for competitive position allows St. Antony to have a better understanding of competition in the healthcare market. This framework assesses the ability of buyers to put pressure on the company, the ability of suppliers to put pressure on the company, threats posed by new entrants to the market, threats posed by substitutes, and the intensity of rivalry in the market. The organization comprehends the dynamics of its industry more effectively through the assessment of these impacts.
The five forces model is a systematic way of identifying competitive factors that characterize an industry and Porter’s five forces may reveal the factors that drive the success and failure of an industry (Farinha et al., 2021). To derive insights using the aforementioned analytical approach, St Antony Main Medical Centre’s management must understand its shortcomings. There is high rivalry among industries as noted by Kinoti (2019) (refer to Table 1) for St. Antony Main Medical Centre whereby bargaining powers of suppliers (physicians) for the Centre are also high and the threat from new entrants- hospitals is high. Perhaps, by adopting the features of both models, St. Antony Main Medical Centre may come up with an all-embracing plan.
Pros and Cons
It simply cannot be the case that Porter’s Five Forces analysis is the only way through which the competition of a market is accessed (Farinha et al., 2021). On the same note, the five-force analysis shows that the supplier’s and buyer’s bargaining power, the threat of substitutes and new entrants, and the industrial rivalry of the healthcare sector are a positive part.
Kinoti (2019) says that perhaps such an examination could assist in possibly defining market appeal, profitability probability, and threats outside. However, this model may require further elaboration in regards to the new trends in healthcare and does not consider any interactions between the factors. Although the five forces are valuable in evaluating competitive structures, the method may be more useful if applied jointly with other strategic tools.
Internal, General, and External Environment
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Internal Environment
Inconvenience experienced in fixing appointments for radiography and rehabilitation services is an area of discontent for most patients and as a result, the quality of care patients receive at St Antony Main Medical Centre is not optimal. especially in internal medicine and infectious diseases, the organization has been challenged by a dearth of an adequate number of physicians. In the same year, Elnakib et al. pointed out that Director of Clinical Operations George Fink identified such constraints because patients’ appointments were delayed by two to four weeks.
This might be due to for instance appointment system congestion leading to very long waiting times. A detailed description by George Fink of the efforts to adequately meet the needs of specific health care brings out the realities facing the problem of physician deficiency particularly in special needs areas.
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General Environment
The organization of competitive centers such as Children’s Medical Centre, Benedictine Health Centre, Redeemer Health and Rehab, and Greenway Surgery Centre make it difficult, and the generally operational business environment influences St. Antony Main Medical Center in responding to change in the business. Troy Holland, Director of Patient Services said the bed deficit in specialist departments results in low operating efficiency.
When it comes to this environmental factor Alemzero et al. (2020) realized that it hinders the ability of the hospital to meet the expectations of the community. For example, a problem with the environment is illustrated by Troy Holland’s words who complained of the absence of beds in specialised departments. Due to this scarcity, patient care experiences some compromises as do operations within the hospital and its capacity to compete favorably within the larger market domain within the healthcare segment.
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External Environment
First, and independently, a free-standing for-profit acute care hospital is planned, which will provide competition to St. Antony Main Medical Centre. One must dare to imagine what all this may mean for changes in market structure, distribution of resources, and especially patient traffic (Heydari et al., 2022). Healthcare choices and decisions, and possibly, patients’ choices may well be influenced by the 50-bed for-profit hospital that is under construction at the moment. One example of an outside factor is the planned for-profit acute care center and it shows the necessity of strategic planning in responding the changes in the sphere of competition.
Some examples of a disturbed environment are the fluctuation of customers’ preferences and the appearance of new rivals. In a nutshell, strategic planning must take into account these outside forces to ready the hospital for market change. He or she might consider factors such as a change in the region’s demography or insurance coverage, which affects the demand for services. St. Antony needs to address the issues that are beyond the organization’s existing environment, new technologies, and new types of therapy for example telemedicine or therapy customization. Nevertheless, comprehending these forces is essential to situating the hospital correctly for change in the market.
Strategic Framework Neglect Possibilities
As it affirms to a given field, the healthcare industry is continually evolving and therefore may leave the St. Antony Main Medical Centre unprepared if it does not implement tools like Porter’s five forces and the SWOT analysis. Frameworks are useful for the organization to factor in the internal environment and rate its capabilities and vulnerabilities (Fuertes et al., 2020). This may be expected to give new entrants a competitive advantage, for instance, for-profit acute care facilities. As a result of the efforts of the St. Antony Main Medical Center, the hospital can use strategic frames considered based on its competitive advantages.
BHA FPX 4104 Assessment 2 Strategic Analysis and Operational Considerations
The field of healthcare is growing more saturated with such establishments as new hospitals and other related facilities; without proper assessment of strengths and unfolding threats within and outside the organization, the enterprise is likely to experience a decline in market share. Non-adherence to these recommendations might mean that St. Antony Main Medical Centre will be left with no plan to defend and consolidateMC. Challenges relating to the care of the patients can be dealt with through the help of strategic planning where the strategically useful frameworks include SWOT.
Visualization and rehabilitation wait time came out as two of the areas patients complained about, although they are aspects of the delivery of patients’ care that deteriorate when the institution does not apply frameworks. Unsatisfied patients, overfilled emergency rooms, difficulty in finding doctors, and insufficient numbers of beds harm the providers and their capacity to persist as businesses (Srinivas et al., 2020).
In the absence of strategic frameworks, the business cannot be in a position to minimize procedures or enhance the utilization of resources. If St. Antony Main Medical Centre does not adopt frameworks that serve to solve efficiency issues that are recurrent in this institution, then this center will face strict consequences. One cannot underestimate the risks that are involved in healthcare organizations; including the efficiency of the organization, the health of the patients, and the competitive advantage. Strategic frameworks will assist the hospital to look at its internal and external environment hence being very critical in its operations.
Conclusion
Finally, the strategic review and operation factors’ nature demonstrate that St. Antony Main Medical Centre has a crucial role in recognizing and solving healthcare issues. When organizations experience conflict internally or externally, SWOT and Porter’s Five Forces frameworks need to be used. Increased competition, complications in operations, and poor patient experience are some of the effects of the lack of these standards in the medical center. It is possible to agree that due to the preparation for the development of a really serious competitor in the form of a for-profit acute care hospital, caution must be exercised.
Two of the most commonly used strategic frameworks are SWOT and PEST: SWOT stands for the assessment of the company’s strengths and weaknesses and the analysis of opportunities and threats while PEST focuses on the assessment of political, economic, social, and legal factors. Strategic planning and positioning in operational decisions and future strategies will reveal to the management of St. Antony Main Medical Centre whether the healthcare organization is ready to compete for the enhanced opportunities or not.
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