Strategic Positioning in Healthcare, Essay Example

Porter’s article discusses the relationship between operational effectiveness and strategy and demonstrates the difference between these two features (Porter, 1996). Essentially, strategic positioning is the establishment of goals and the provision of plans that will allow this effectiveness to occur. It is necessary for organizations to fully analyze their operations to gain a greater understanding of interventions that can be applied to ensure that workplace productivity increases. To be effective, healthcare institutions need to select a unique position that will set themselves aside from other operations. Achieving competitive advantage and sustainability is an important business component of healthcare administration. It is therefore necessary for healthcare organizations to remain goal oriented in their development of a strategic plan.

An example of strategic positioning in healthcare is the use of the Vanguard’s Activity System (Healthcare in the United States, n.d.). Essentially, this tool allows healthcare administrators to map out a set of guiding questions during the establishment of the strategic plan. The goal of this is to strengthen the strategic fit, which is accomplished by editing different activities in the map to determine which combination of steps would ensure the most effective strategic position. This model involves a consideration of the individuals within the organization that are responsible for each activity, how activities could be reinforced and serve to strengthen one another, and a determination as to whether altering one activity could result in the elimination of another. For most organizations, this model is used to develop strategic positioning in a manner that allows for the smallest number of steps, and the most effective and quickly generated result. Organizations should consult internal and external research findings in order to ensure that this process produces realistic results (Roper, 2011).

References

Porter, M. E. (1996). What is strategy? Harvard Business Review (November-December), 2-19. Health Care in the United States. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_the_United_States

Roper, W. (2011). The U.S. healthcare system—Current and future. YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yJqAdfO2wk (21 minutes).