Strategic Plan Part I Conceptualizing a Business

Mckesson

Business Conceptualization: McKesson's Emergent Digital Medical Imaging Technology

The medical industry is changing rapidly around us. With the adoption of new laws holding healthcare facilities more directly accountable for patient outcomes, the pressure is being felt ever more by hospitals and other care providers. The demands for facilities to become more efficient, more accurate and more precise has, justifiably, come to the forefront of the public discourse following the enacting of the Affordable Care Act. As a result, there are tremendous opportunities now opening up to healthcare technology firms with the ability to help relieve the pressure from some of these demands. This is where firms like McKesson have the best chance at driving industry-wide innovation. With McKesson's emergent set of medical imaging solutions, the firm places itself on the forefront of a rapidly evolving medical field.

Defining the Business:

McKesson is one of the largest and most successful firms in the private healthcare sector. According to CNNMoney (2013), McKesson would be the 14th highest earning corporation in the United States, totally over $122 billion in revenue. Primarily a retailer of pharmaceutical products, McKesson also markets technological and procedural innovations with the aim of benefitting hospitals and other private healthcare providers. In the case of its medical imaging technologies, the goal of McKesson is to specifically target these larger healthcare system clients.

The products in question for this particular project are a range of Information Technology-based solutions to the need for a leaner and more efficient way of transferring healthcare documents. Thus, McKesson has recently introduced its PACS (picture archiving and communication system), RIS (radiology information), and CVIS (cardiovascular imaging systems) for adoption in clinics, hospitals, emergency facilities and private physicians offices. The goal, with these products, is to "help health care organizations of all sizes and complexity manage the massive amount of specialized imaging applications that come from dealing with today's medical imaging department. Our solutions focus on workflow, collaboration and productivity enhancements to help you improve your clinical, financial and operational outcomes." (McKesson, p. 1)

Formal Mission Statement:

In offering a formal Mission Statement for the medical imaging subdivision of the broader McKesson brand, we wish to focus on the role that McKesson can play in improving the speed, accuracy and efficiency with which medical information, documentation and imaging are shared between facilities. We aspire to a medical system that produces better health outcomes, reduces wasteful time management and ultimately results in a better and more fluid experience for the patient. We also work to improve the job functionality and time management capacity of healthcare professionals at every level of the system.

Vision:

The future of the medical field will be in producing technology that evolves with the needs of the end users, which include physicians, nurses and the patients themselves. At McKesson, we hold a vision of our firm as continuing to be a leader in solutions that improve patient lives without sacrificing economic efficiency, privacy protections or opportunities for business growth.

Guiding Principles

For McKesson, the pursuit of innovation with a focus on maintaining an ethical business practice has been an important balance. Indeed, innovation and ethics could be seen as the two key guiding principles of the firm. According to McKesson's own internal website, "our software, automation technology, distribution and business services play an essential role in addressing the challenges health care organizations face today -- and shaping how they'll overcome them tomorrow. We connect people and organizations, support the quest for higher quality and improved clinical outcomes, and help health care businesses run better. " (McKesson1, p. 1)

This denotes that the firm has worked to cultivate an internal culture of ingenuity, creativity and boldness. The greatest successes that the healthcare field has seen are those which have been achieved in highly open, collaborative and risk-taking settings. McKesson's considerable resources make us more than willing to invest a considerable amount of time, personnel and effort into forging new solutions for long ingrained problems.

Strategic Direction:

The strategic direction of McKesson toward the introduction of new medical IT innovations is especially important as hospitals are scrambling for ways of reducing waste and costs. Indeed, we are in a position to advertise great savings to our clients as compared to the initial investment in our emergent technology. According to the article by Howell (2012), the transition toward digital transferring of medical imaging has the potential to lower unnecessary costs on the healthcare system by a significant margin. Howell reports that "as a significant shift in practice, online image transfer eliminates the possibility that an image-containing CD will be lost when patients visit a new provider or clinical setting. If a patient forgets the CD or if it is misplaced, you face having to either postpone service or repeat scans -- and that's expensive. According to a 2008 McKinsey Global Institute report on diagnostic services, duplicated studies accounted for $26.5 billion in unnecessary healthcare costs." (Howell p. 1)