Strategic Management of health care organizations Essay

Strategic Management of health care organizations - Essay Example To do this, different processes associated with service delivery like efficient patient flow, wait times and various administrative functions have been addressed. This has led to different implementation strategies like pre-service, point-of-service, and after-service has been devised. All the areas of service are meant to provide the customers with valued services. While pre-service is prior to the encounter, point-of-service (POS) is at the time of the encounter and post-service is after the encounter. Different healthcare organizations have benefited by aligning strategies based on different encounters. The pre-service is devised after determining the customers’ wants and needs. This requires first determining who the customers are, the price acceptable to them, the time and location convenient to them and then developing internal culture that focuses on customers (SDS, n.d.). Customer and competitor descriptions are essential to decide on this service area. The basic premise is – what does the customer want in terms of product, price, place and promotion. A thorough market research is essential for this. This is then followed by market segmentation based on clinical areas, demographics, psychographics and markets defined by growth opportunities. A customer analysis is then done to determine which should be the target market. It also determines what motivates the individual to use health care and what aspects of services offered are really important to the customer. Whether the customer is currently satisfied is determined which helps to improve upon the clinical serv ice. It also determines on what basis the customer chooses one organization over another. Hence the central issue in this service area is determining the right customer and devising the rest of the strategies based on that. For POS the central issues are quality, efficiency, innovation and flexibility. The internal assessment of