Transitioning from Mine to Ours: Developing Regional Service Line Strategies
As health systems continue to grow and consolidate, they encounter challenges to transform from a collection of individual institutions with historically competitive relationships and different cultures into a collective, collaborative whole. This is accentuated by continued reliance on measuring financial success through individual facility P&L outcomes.
To achieve true “success,” a system-based mentality must evolve that creates mutually beneficial win-win scenarios for all members. One strategy that can catalyze this transformation is to design a regional hub-and-spoke core service line structure that concentrates tertiary services at the hub and ensures foundational services are available at the smaller spoke facilities – with the potential for intermediate service locations as appropriate. This concept focuses on meeting patients where they are by providing most care close to home and facilitating care at the hub when necessary. Developing a regional care delivery model rather than an individual facility care delivery model balances community needs with system-wide efficiency that strives to reduce internal competition, enhance collaboration, and promote network integrity.
Regional service planning may entail enhancing services in the outlying communities, which might not be feasible if each facility is left to its own devices. Enhancing services in outlying communities can increase market capture locally and at the tertiary hub – supporting local sustainability and tertiary center growth. The region thrives and everyone has a role in its success. However, addressing these changes requires a systemness mentality to overcome local self-interest and a governance structure that aligns incentives, centralizes certain functions, and promotes cultural change.
Learning Objective:
- Identify how health systems can develop regional hub-and-spoke strategies for core service lines that maximize geographic care delivery and promote patient capture and retention.
- Determine desirable specialty resources needed for the model and how they should be deployed to support both local care delivery and global network integrity.
- Apply these concepts to systemwide marketing, provider recruitment, and collective measures of success.
Created in partnership with SHSMD.
About SHSMD
Serving approximately 4,000 members, the Society for Health Care Strategy & Market Development (SHSMD), a professional membership group of the American Hospital Association, powers the strategy professions of health care, including but not limited to marketing, digital engagement, communications, strategic planning, and business development.
As the largest membership association in its sector, SHSMD helps its members stay at the forefront of health care’s rapidly evolving landscape while expanding its members’ knowledge and network to create value for the organizations and communities they serve.
SHSMD supports diversity and inclusion in its membership. Diversity is multi-dimensional and appreciating our individual differences is essential to meeting the needs of the communities we serve.
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