Engaging in Strategic Management in Healthcare Organizations

Overview

This is the second part of a two-part Strategic Management for Healthcare Organizations course. The first course, "Intro to Strategic Management for Healthcare Organizations", focuses on business strategy. This second part presents and discusses analytical frameworks for making strategic decisions, drawing on different disciplines, including economics and management. You will get an understanding of how strategic decisions are made within organizations. After exploring the different levels of strategy in the first course, you will now dive into each level in greater detail. You will have the opportunity to conduct an external evaluation that examines market, environment, customer, and competitor analyses. You will get an understanding of strategic issues in healthcare organizations, including mergers and acquisitions, vertical integration, joint ventures and alliances, performance-control systems, and organizational design.

Syllabus

Module 1 - Business Unit Strategies, Functional Strategies, and Getting Approval

In this module you will need to come up with some strategic decisions. What you propose to strategically achieve has to be consistent with what an external and internal analyses, plus it needs to be consistent with the corporate strategy. To implement the business strategy, you need to do so through our functional strategies. You will discuss strategic alternatives, functional strategies, and going through the approval process to get our strategy approved.

Module 2 - Corporate Decisions and Strategic Alternatives - Part 1

Corporate strategy defines the company and allocates resources among the various SBUs. We started the course by discussing how corporate sets the vision and the goals for the SBUs. Now that we have an understanding of business strategy, we can discuss in more detail how corporate supports those plans. But corporate can also take on other approaches, such as acquiring companies, forming partnerships, or developing new business areas. In this module, we will consider the strategic alternatives that corporate strategies can take on.

Module 3 Corporate Decisions and Strategic Alternatives - Part 2

Another decision for corporate strategists is to determine the level of diversification. Companies diversify in order to grow and hopefully achieve greater profitability. By going after markets the organization is not currently in, the company is trying to develop new lines of business. In this module we will discuss diversification as well as mergers and acquisitions.

Module 4: Strategic Leadership and Implementation

A corporate strategy is meaningless without leadership in both creating the plan and in its implementation. In this module we will cover several challenges in developing and implementing strategy and then the leadership approaches one can take to overcome those challenges. The leadership style we suggest is one of leader as coach, who empowers the employees so as to create a learning organization. This is most apt in an environment of change and unanticipated risks, as forecasting the future is nigh impossible.