Being Non-Profit, But Pro-Revenue
The COVID-19 pandemic reshaped the healthcare industry.
Whether you work in a hospital system, an academic medical institution, or another organization dedicated to keeping communities healthy, priorities have shifted from a volume-based model to a value-based approach. Strategic initiatives now focus not only on patient care but also on supporting your workforce sustainably—ensuring your ability to heal your community for years to come.
While your healthcare organization may be non-profit, your strategic plan must drive fiscal stability to provide the highest quality care indefinitely. To achieve this, you need a way to extract meaningful insights from vast amounts of data, allowing you to pinpoint exactly what to target for improved patient outcomes. This capability is what sets your hospital apart in a competitive market.
Adapting Your Plan to Today’s Healthcare Needs
Finding the right levers to pull to make lasting change is challenging. Quality of care, safety, and operational excellence used to be the sole pillars of most every hospital’s strategic plan, with the hope of resulting in a better competitive edge. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the recent past were often focused on inpatient flow alone – improving wait times, length of stay, and readmission rates (get more examples here).
But with the prevalence of burnout across healthcare roles – some rates as high as 62% in 2023 (Becker’s Hospital Review) – and the 1.2% decline of medical school applicants year over year in 24-25 (AAMC), there’s been a tectonic shift to prioritize workforce development, alongside traditional healthcare goals.
Identifying KPIs in a Value-Based Model
The first step in drafting a plan with impactful and sustainable outcomes is to determine your organization’s mission and vision (read best practices here). Becker’s Hospital Review has also reported the U.S. News & World Report’s top ten hospitals’ real-life mission statements — for inspiration!
From there, choose a set of goals that directly support the mission – as pillars supporting a roof. For example, if the mission statement is:
Healing our community through patient-first care, healing from within by caring for our own, and healing our industry through our educational arm.
The organization’s 3 focal points might be:
1. Achieve Service Excellence – Ties directly to “patient-first care”
2. Increase Employee Satisfaction – Ties directly to “caring for our own”
3. Lead Research & Development – Ties directly to “educational arm”
Moving down to the next tier, when choosing KPIs or other metrics for your strategic plan (more advice on how here!), ask whether the initiative or project, when completed, will have directly helped one of you achieve one of your main organizational goals.
Using our example from above, the cascading actionable goals could become:
1. Achieve Service Excellence
- Decrease number of incidents reported by hospital workers by 4%
- Increase community perception of hospital name by 15%
2. Increase Employee Satisfaction
- Increase number of staff who would recommend our organization as a place to work by 5%
- Increase staff retention by 3%
3. Lead Research & Development
- Receive 10% more in grant money this year
- Increase our perception as a preferred provider in the cardiovascular community
Initiatives are then chosen to support each of those goals from there. Continuing to use the example above, some tactics might be:
Achieve Service Excellence
- Increase community perception of hospital name by 15%
- Increase access by launching underserved population outreach program
- Conduct informational events at 8 local libraries this year
- Increase access by launching underserved population outreach program
More inspiration! Read more from Becker’s to see what other hospitals’ CEOs are focusing on in 2025.
By building a ladder of goals from your care professionals’ daily work to your board room’s initiatives – staff, nurses, technicians, etc. can feel more connected to the impact their everyday tasks have on their organization and community as a whole.
Tracking Progress Towards Organizational Goals
One thing hasn’t changed in the last few years, and that’s how difficult it is to gather updates on your plan once it’s in motion – because so is your staff! Constantly moving from one room to another, administering care, reacting to incidents, keeping people alive.
Collecting monthly plan status updates and data is complicated further by a recent increase in healthcare partnerships. With the emergence of Clinically Integrated Networks (CINs) – providers partnering together to form a more seamless experience for the patient (read more from RAND) – and further partnership between healthcare providers and academic medical institutions to share data and resources (National Library of Medicine), there are more external contributors to strategic plans than ever.
Quantitative and qualitative data alike need to be quick and easy to provide from anywhere on the floor without taking time away from patient care. The ideal solution is software that sends out a status update request email with one click, that plan contributors – both internal and external to the organization – can provide in the email body itself, without disrupting urgent and important patient care work. Status updates are crucial to providing transparency to plan owners (Strategy Officers or Performance Improvement Team leaders), and also helping initiative owners collaborate to get the support they need to achieve the organization’s goals.
Using Data to to Inform Strategic Decision-Making
In the quest to become a preferred provider or financially stable healthcare organization, there is so much data – most of it being “big data” (read more about big data here). The nationally known Healthy People 2030 federal initiative is helping the healthcare industry course-correct preventative care that took a downturn during the Covid-19 pandemic. The increased prevalence in chronic conditions (CDC) has had a severe impact on today’s hospital systems.
Using the example of increased chronic conditions above, the available data is vast. How do you use it to make decisions about your strategy?
Let’s say your organization is planning on sponsoring a breast cancer screening vehicle to tackle your goal of diagnosing earlier stages of disease in your community. How do you measure your success in a way that doesn’t just celebrate, “We checked this off, we did what we planned to do!” but truly, “We helped prevent more serious conditions in our designated population”?
While it largely varies by use case, generally the vast amounts of data from partners – such as academic medical research or federal organizations – would be compiled into a business intelligence tool to model the data in a readable format, such as a dashboard.
But don’t stop there!
There are four levels of data insights:
1. Descriptive – Telling the story of the numbers on the page; “What is happening now?”
2. Diagnostic – Why the numbers are most likely trending a certain way; “What is causing it?”
3. Predictive – What the data is inferring will happen in the future; “What will happen next?”
4. Prescriptive – What previous data supports would change the outcome; “What should we do about it?”
Most organizations are firmly in Stage 2 of data analysis, with many on the cusp of Stage 3. But here’s where the healthcare industry is turning to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to move into a prescriptive model – with caution and thoughtfulness:
“Traditional methods, which relied heavily on physician experience and intuition, are now being augmented with databacked insights that provide a more comprehensive understanding of patient health. This approach allows for better diagnosis and treatment planning. It enables healthcare providers to predict future health risks and intervene early, potentially saving lives and reducing the burden on healthcare systems (Enticott, Johnson, & Teede, 2021; Kriegova, Kudelka, Radvansky, & Gallo, 2021).”
That is to say, more and more organizations are turning to information modeling to identify key focus areas that can be adjusted for greater impact. Likewise, your strategic plan should leverage data in the same way.
Import your business intelligence graphs and visualizations into your strategic plan dashboard to view key health statistics—such as the number of late-stage breast cancer detections last year—alongside your own plan data, like the number of attendees at screening vehicle events. Where do you see correlations? If there’s a positive correlation, consider reallocating resources to areas where the data suggests a direct impact on achieving your goals.
Remaining Agile in an Ever-Changing Environment
As members of the healthcare community, healing and wellness are always top priorities. While the landscape evolves, these remain your North Star. Your 2-, 3-, or even 5-year strategic plans should stay aligned with their overarching goals but remain flexible to adapt to industry shifts.
Once you’ve built a top-down plan to increase buy-in, established a dynamic status-tracking method, and leveraged data for informed pivots, you’re well-positioned to thrive with a value-based strategic plan.
Learn how AchieveIt supports healthcare organizations with everything from drafting strategic plans from scratch to ongoing professional support. Connect with one of our Execution Experts for a tailored look at how AchieveIt fits your organization, and schedule a free demo today.
