HS450 Unit 5 Strategic Goal Memo Example

Four Goals, One Owner Each: A Unit 5 Strategic Goal Memo Built With Hoshin Kanri for an Outpatient Therapy Group

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HS450: Strategic Planning and Change Management for Health Care

Unit 5 Strategic Goal Memo

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Halloway Therapy Partners, its leaders, baselines and targets are composite; the sources cited are real.

Memorandum

To: Chief Executive Officer, Halloway Therapy Partners

From: Director of Strategy and Operations

Re: Strategic goals for the coming fiscal year

Recommendation

Adopt four goals for the coming year, retire two goals carried over from last year's plan, and review progress formally in the ninth month. The four goals answer the four binding forces in the environmental scan and the position statement in the SWOT analysis. Each has one owner and one measure.

The Goals

1. Reduce Medicare Advantage visits denied or delayed by authorization from 11 percent to 6 percent. Owner: revenue cycle manager. Horizon: twelve months. Measure: share of Medicare Advantage visits with an authorization denial or a delay of more than five business days, from the denial report. Source: binding force 3.

2. Fill both vacant physical therapist assistant positions at the rural clinics and hold them for twelve months. Owner: director of human resources. Horizon: nine months to fill, twelve to retain. Measure: filled positions and retention at twelve months. Baseline: two vacancies open for seven months. Source: binding force 6.

3. Grow pelvic health visits by 20 percent, from 9,400 to about 11,300 a year, by adding a third certified specialist and a second site. Owner: pelvic health program lead. Horizon: twelve months. Measure: visits from the scheduling system. Source: the SWOT's single VRIO-tested advantage and the waitlist of 70 patients.

4. Retain at least 95 percent of referral volume from the three independent orthopedic practices. Owner: chief clinical officer. Horizon: twelve months. Measure: referrals by practice, quarterly. Baseline: about 14,000 referred visits last year. Source: binding force 8.

Goals Retired

Two goals from last year's plan are retired. Opening a twelfth clinic in the northern suburb is retired because the SWOT showed that growth there competes with the sports performance center rather than adding new patients. Raising satisfaction to 4.9 is retired because satisfaction is already high and not a differentiator; it will be monitored, not pursued.

Retiring two goals is as much a strategic decision as adopting four, because every goal kept on the list draws on the same managers' time.

How Hoshin Kanri Shapes the Goals

Hoshin kanri, a planning approach developed in Japanese manufacturing and adopted in health care, links a few breakthrough objectives over three to five years to annual goals that departments negotiate rather than receive (Akao, 1991). It is used here in two places.

First, vertical alignment. Halloway's three-year objectives, drawn from the SWOT's position statement, come down to three: keep the independent surgeons' referrals, make more of the pelvic health program, and lean less on payers whose prior-approval rules eat staff time. Each annual goal sits under one objective: goals 1 and 2 under reducing exposure and stabilizing the rural clinics, goal 3 under pelvic health, goal 4 under the referral base. An attached matrix shows the links.

Second, catchball, the negotiated exchange between levels. Draft goals went to all eleven clinic directors in a two-week comment period. Directors at the rural clinics argued that goal 2 should include retention, not only filling the positions, because the last two assistants hired left within a year; the goal was revised. The pelvic health lead asked for a second site rather than only a third specialist, because the waitlist is concentrated on the south side; the goal now includes both. Recording these changes shows that the goals were negotiated, which is what makes the owners accountable.

Why One Owner and One Measure

Each goal has one owner, named by title, because shared ownership tends to mean no ownership. Each has one measure with a baseline, so progress can be judged without argument. Balanced scorecard practice recommends a small number of measures tied directly to strategy rather than long lists of indicators (Kaplan & Norton, 1996), and four goals is within what Halloway's leadership team can review monthly.

Review

The leadership team will look at the four measures each month, with a formal checkpoint in month nine, when any goal off track by more than a third will be revised or retired. Health care strategy texts describe the review as the point where a plan either becomes management or becomes a document (Ginter et al., 2018).

Decision Requested

Approve the four goals and the two retirements for the coming fiscal year.

References

Akao, Y. (Ed.). (1991). Hoshin kanri: Policy deployment for successful TQM. Productivity Press.

Ginter, P. M., Duncan, W. J., & Swayne, L. E. (2018). The strategic management of health care organizations (8th ed.). Wiley.

Kaplan, R. S., & Norton, D. P. (1996). The balanced scorecard: Translating strategy into action. Harvard Business School Press.