In this lecture, we'll be covering strategic planning tools. You'll be introduced to a few strategic planning tools including SWOT and scenario planning. We'll also go over some of the factors you should consider when choosing the right tool. Although we won't be going into detail about Porter's Five Forces or Hambrick's Strategy Diamond, remember that these are examples of other strategic planning tools that you might want to look into on your own. So, what exactly is SWOT? S-W-O-T stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This particular strategic planning tool takes into account the internal strengths and weaknesses of a particular organization. It also factors in external opportunities and threats that your health system, your startup, your non-profit organization might be dealing with. In this SWOT framework, what it's trying to do is, it's helping the team that's planning make the most of the positive factors that they have going before them. It's also trying to lessen the impact of the negative factors by having you look both internally and externally at what lies ahead. When dealing with SWOT as a strategic planning tool, the main question that it's trying to answer is, where should an organization focus its internal capabilities, given the external, competitive environment? The example on this next slide comes from Jim Austin's book, "Leading Strategic Change in an Era of Healthcare Transformation". As you can see here, for one particular organization, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats have been listed out. In strength, the organization looked inward and found that they had strong sales and marketing infrastructure. But from a weakness perspective, you see that in the second bullet, they listed that there were a lack of blockbuster product launches. For opportunities, in the bottom left, you see that the organization found that one of its opportunities was the fact that it could potentially have movement into high growth foreign markets. As far as threats, in the bottom right, you see that one of the concerns in the second bullet was that there could be development setbacks impacting late stage R&D pipelines, R&D meaning research and development. So, remember, SWOT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, can be a great tool to use in your organization's strategic planning process. Now, the next type of strategic planning tool we'll talk about is scenario planning. This one can be used to identify future options, forward-thinking approaches in times of great uncertainty and volatility. With scenario planning, the tool allows individuals undertaking a strategic planning initiative to examine a variety of plausible alternatives that could take place in the future. By thinking through each of these alternatives, an organization is able to methodically figure out what might need to be done in anticipation of those particular scenarios that could play out. With scenario planning, the teams work together to tell a story of how a variety of different factors might interact with each other under certain set conditions in the future. So, again, in times of great uncertainty, scenario planning can be an excellent strategic planning tool. In this particular approach, planners design a variety of scenarios that help a team to think about new ways of how the future would impact the existing platform and the existing strategic plan for an organization. The main question being answered with scenario planning is, how can we survive, ideally prosper, no matter what the future brings? The example on the next slide is based off of Jim Austin's book, "Leading Strategic Change in an Era of Healthcare Transformation". Remember that with the scenarios, we're looking at a variety of factors that could interact with each other. So, industry, technology, environment, the economy, regulatory factors, the political landscape, existing business models, and the changing customer. This is extremely important in healthcare, where many of our interventions are for the patient, for the consumer. So, when it comes to evaluating forces, especially in Healthcare IT, you want to be taking into account how the patient's needs, how citizen facing interventions might need to be adapted based on the changing times. Remember that with scenario planning, you're trying to factor for a variety of possible future worlds that could take place. So, we're moving from the present to the future. Could it be scenario A, B, C, or D? When choosing the right strategic planning tool, you want to make sure that it's appropriate for the situation or given environment in which your organization currently stands. If you're in an environment that's stable but moderately challenging, SWOT might be the right tool to use. However, if you're dealing with a time of great uncertainty and highly challenging environments, especially in healthcare, then scenario planning is the right way to go. As organizations are moving from a model of fee-for-service to value-based payments, as they're trying to transform from individual clinical encounters to a population health management approach, scenario planning can be a very effective tool that takes into account the regulatory changes, the potential unknown of reimbursement and financial situations. So, questions to ask yourself when picking a tool, again, future uncertainty. The examples I just provided were of STEEP factors, right? What does STEEP stand for? Social, technological, environment, economic, and political. So, when it comes to technological factors, is blockchain a technology that your particular organization or product is going to be very dependent on? If so, are the limitations in blockchain adoption going to be a barrier to your organization's success? Regarding economic issues, is your product something that only caters to the top one percent of patients? Is it something that is reimbursed for providers? As far as political changes, we all know the impact that the ACA had on the United States Healthcare Landscape. What other regulations, MIPS, MACRA, and other, could change the success of your particular organizations portfolio, implementations, and future? Now for a question. What would you do in this situation? Your roommate from undergrad now works for a non-profit that provides healthcare to the homeless. They tell you that the concept of strategic planning doesn't apply to them. It's really something that's specific to for-profit organizations. Which of the following would you say to your roommate? Would you tell them, "That's right. Those concepts are specific just to for-profit companies"? Would you say actually those concepts don't apply to for-profit companies that all, or would you tell your roommate, "Those concepts of strategic planning are actually applied to both for-profit and non-profit companies"? If you said the last answer, that's correct. Strategic planning tools and the process of strategic planning is something that applies to both companies that are for-profit, as well as non-profit entities.
