Strategic Planning in Healthcare -

Strategic Planning in Healthcare - Medical University of South Carolina

How does MUSC deliver its services?

As an academic institution, MUSC delivers its services in the form of education programs, primarily at the graduate and postgraduate level, for health care professionals and biomedical scientists.

As a research institution, MUSC promotes the application of new knowledge and actively supports the fields of biomedical, behavioral and health-related investigations.

As a clinical institution, MUSC provides healthcare services to the community that are otherwise unavailable locally and provides medical services to those who are unable to afford the medical treatment they require.

Question 2. Who needs or will "buy" their services?

Presumably, those community member constituents who require medical services furnished by MUSC who can afford their share of the costs associated with their treatment will "buy" MUSC clinical services.

Presumably, the 2000+ students enrolled in degree programs at six local institutions of higher education will "buy" MUSC educational services. Additionally, 500+ graduate health care professionals receiving residency training at MUSC will "buy" its services. In addition, MUSC employs approximately 850 full-time and 1600 part-time faculty members.

Question 3. What may be the reason that MUSC needs a Strategic Plan and how may MUSC benefit from a new strategic plan? Please explain.

The primary reason MUSC needs a new strategic plan is that the healthcare industry and related educational programs are dynamic rather than static. The new plan must allow for the continual evolution of medical fields and for changes in their myriad interrelationships. The main benefits to MUSC are improved synchronicity in its administration of its programs, better structure to allocate funds in response to changing necessity, and improved ability to provide quality care to more patients.

Similarly, the pace of technological progress in healthcare now means that interdisciplinary programs develop and change so quickly that the lines separating all the individual traditional areas of specialization and clinical units also changes. Therefore, a strategic plan that predates the accelerated pace of current progress is ill-equipped for a more modern institution.

For the same reason, individual (non-integrated) plans that were appropriate for traditional administration are no longer optimal for more highly interconnected educational fields and operational units. The old plans must be replaced with a comprehensive plan that incorporates all the MUSC areas of service in a manner more conducive to their joint functioning. Toward that same end, the new strategic plan must also include provisions for a comprehensive centralized governance system.

The second most important reason that MUSC requires a new strategic plan relates to the impact of managed care, HMO insurance, and the healthcare crisis that accounts for many uninsured patients.. Evolving legislation delineating the respective funding responsibilities of federal and state government programs may place additional financial burden on healthcare institutions, particularly those that are engaged in providing education services, those that maintain research programs, and those that furnish medical services to a large proportion of patients who cannot afford to pay for their share of those services. Therefore, a comprehensive plan must allow for subsequent change within its formulation, because MUSC maintains educational programs and research programs, in addition to serving a large needy and/or uninsured constituency.

Finally, the new plan must address the formulation and integration of comprehensive communications programs designed to educate the MUSC patient community about the full range of MUSC medical services available. Ideally, this will include communications strategies and programs that will educate healthcare workers to communicate with patients in a manner that facilitates their ability to get the most out of MUSC programs.

Question 4. Could you propose a new mission statement for MUSC?

As South Carolina's only comprehensive academic, research and point-of-service health center, the Medical University of South Carolina provides a full range of programs and services in the biomedical sciences that would otherwise be unavailable to many South