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Integration of Strategic Planning, Business Development and Marketing

By The SHSMD Team posted 02-25-2019 03:00 PM

  
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At any hospital or health system, strategic planning, business development and marketing, are all dedicated to the execution of strategy. We spoke with three SHSMD members whose organizational structure integrates the three professional disciplines to learn more about how this affects strategy development and execution.

The three strategists we interviewed are B.J. Krech, chief strategy officer at West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, IL; Mike Sluzarz, vice president of marketing and business development at Cape Regional in Cape May, NJ; and Paula Widerlite, chief strategy officer at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, MD. Both West Suburban (172 beds) and Cape Regional (180 beds) are smaller systems, while Anne Arundel (405 beds) is larger.
These executives all oversee integrated departments and consider this integration a significant driver of success by promoting coordination of efforts, reducing silos and powering the synergy of the different disciplines.

West Suburban Medical Center
Krech reports directly to the CEO. The directors of marketing and community outreach report to him, as do physician liaisons and some of the clinical functions. The marketing function used to report directly to the CEO, but as of July 2018, reports to Krech. Krech said West Suburban “runs pretty lean” and one of the goals of the change was to reduce the number of direct reports to the CEO. He noted that because strategy and marketing were already working in close coordination before, this change mostly formalized and augmented the alignment of marketing and strategy, rather than significantly changing functions or culture.

Krech emphasized that this close integration is fundamentally about benefitting the community. Service line development, consumer engagement, community outreach and communications are all driven by strategy, which is itself driven by community needs. He advised any organization considering a more formal alignment to, “First, sit down and talk about what the goals are for each of the functions as they exist today. In most cases, the alignment will be there and the teams are already collaborating.” Further integration, then, can focus on developing ways to optimize that collaboration and “finding ways to make it even better.”

Cape Regional
Cape Regional, like West Suburban, is a smaller health system. Sluzarz is responsible for strategy. When he joined Cape Regional three years ago, the board and president tasked him with combining the marketing and business development functions. Marketing used to report directly to the hospital president and business development used to report to finance.

Sluzarz said the board and president were fully committed to the alignment and the different departments all saw the benefits of the integration, so there was a high level of trust and commitment and no real resistance to the change. There were “some hiccups in the process” as staff adjusted to all of the changes. For example, the hospital previously focused mostly on marketing to physicians to build referrals, rather than marketing directly to consumers, so the marketing team had to learn new approaches. They also changed tactics from traditional print marketing to digital marketing, which also called for doing things differently. Overall, though, Sluzarz said the transition was very smooth.

He added that, especially for smaller hospitals, it’s vital to integrate marketing, strategy and business development. Sometimes it makes sense to put business development under marketing. “It’s all about the consumer and how they perceive the brand – the brand drives business.” He also noted that integration needs “the right senior leadership, the right integration leader and the right plan.”

Boards and senior leadership may need to expand their understanding of marketing, to see clearly that it’s not about creating marketing pieces but about developing the brand. This is especially true in smaller hospitals that are surrounded, like Cape Regional, by larger hospitals that will quickly take advantage of a weak brand and negative consumer perceptions.

Cape Regional didn’t set specific savings goals for the integration, but did set new key performance indicators for patient engagement, conversions, market share and volume. Sluzarz noted that having marketing and business development focusing on the same KPIs was both more efficient and more effective as “it keeps everybody working toward the same goals.”

Anne Arundel Medical Center
Widerlite also reports to the CEO. The vice president of marketing and communications reports to her, and public relations and decision support report to the vice president. Like Krech, these departments were already integrated when she took on the chief strategy officer role.

Strategy drives marketing, communications and public relations and so “it only makes sense to benefit from the synergies,” she said. Decision support also creates synergies with the strategy function. (Unlike some decision support teams, theirs performs both qualitative and quantitative research, including market share analysis and environmental scans.)

The market research function focuses on traditional research such as focus groups. Anne Arundel recently added a vice president of population health role whose responsibilities include performing the medical center’s community health needs assessment. The health needs analyses also inform and help shape strategy.

Widerlite credits part of the organization’s success to an emphasis on evidence-based and data-driven decisions and strategy. “Does the research identify the outcomes you want and establish the metrics?” There isn’t a gap between qualitative and quantitative research or the stereotypical “creative” in marketing and the “data heads” in decision support. An emphasis on working from the same data and analyses maximizes the synergy.
Fundamentally, she said, “Strategy should drive everything. If growth is the strategic goal, that’s going to drive all the functions and the department integration enables that.”

Integration is Essential
Strategic planning, business development and marketing are essential to the fulfilment of strategy and are themselves driven by the need for high-quality data and analysis. The integration that we see in these three hospitals is built on the synergies and added efficiencies that can be achieved when the three functions work together in an environment with shared dependencies. Especially in a time of rapid change, integration can ensure that strategy, business development and marketing are operating from the same assumptions and data, collaborating internally, and focusing on the same KPIs and common goals.

If your organization has integrated its marketing, planning, business development and communications function, please share your story with SHSMD today!
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