The invitation read: "Please come to our hospital offices this Friday and be ready to share your convictions regarding our need to assess and remix the service line bundle. We need your expertise, and are finally ready to take this seriously."
I was delighted. I was intrigued. I was flabbergasted that this took so long. I was amazed that the top guys were finally getting the message. And I was astonished at how many times this conversation had occurred in the last 2 years.
I've been providing strategic planning services to healthcare organizations for almost 20 years through my consulting practice. "Service line growth" has become the latest buzz phrase, although it's been around for longer than 2 decades.
My message is to provide clarity to decision teams about the kinds of business that they are in, the kinds of business they should be in, and the kinds of business they need to divest from their operations. My approach includes a combination of financial due diligence and market intelligence gleaned from our primary research efforts. And it never ceases to amaze me how health organizations rarely applied the practices of health diagnostics and treatment to their own fiscal stealth.
Why is this? Why are healthcare organizations and specifically hospitals and medical practice groups wary of scrutinizing their successes and failures to find a better approach to delivering care, both from a customer-friendly perspective and a financial stewardship basis? Let's share some answers and write about this topic as the story progresses.
-----Michael
You have the service line concept in the right and tight focus. It will be a major factor in health care revenues for years to come. My compliments.
Posted by: Bill | May 06, 2008 at 06:15 PM