BUSI 494 Week 1 Discussion Board Forum 1 Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: The Purpose of Strategic Management in Health Care

BUSI 494 Healthcare Administration Capstone, Discussion Board Forum 1

Thread by [Student Name]

The group, its member organizations and the replies to other groups are composites; the textbook, Scripture and the peer-reviewed sources cited are real.

Our group includes members who work at a physician practice, a home health agency, a regional hospital and a large health system, and our discussion began with a simple question: how does each organization decide what to do next year? The answers varied widely. The physician practice runs on a list of projects its partners agree on each January, such as adding a provider or replacing equipment, with no written plan linking them. The home health agency has a mission statement and a budget but little analysis of its market. The regional hospital has a strategic plan, but most managers could not name its goals. Only the health system has a formal process with a three-year plan, annual updates and measures reviewed by its board. When we compared notes, the member from the health system could explain why her organization had opened two urgent care centers and closed an underused inpatient unit, while the others described decisions that seemed to arrive one at a time, often in response to a crisis or a competitor's move.

Moseley (2018) describes strategic management as a continuous process in which an organization defines its mission and vision, analyzes its external environment and internal capabilities, chooses strategies that fit both, carries those strategies out and measures results to adjust course. By that standard, only one of our four organizations practices strategic management; the others practice project management or budgeting without a strategic frame. The difference matters because projects chosen one at a time can conflict with each other, drain resources from priorities and leave the organization reacting to competitors rather than anticipating them. The home health agency, for example, spent heavily on a new scheduling system the same year its largest referral source, a hospital, began its own home health service, a threat a simple environmental scan would have flagged.

Research supports the value of a disciplined process, even if the evidence is not as strong as planning advocates sometimes claim. Wongsin et al. (2025) reviewed 16 studies of strategic planning and organizational performance in the public health sector published from 2015 to 2024 and found a confirmed relationship between planning and performance, operating through mediating factors, with human resource practices among the most important contributors to performance. Apenteng et al. (2026) examined 2,749 U.S. hospitals and found that system-affiliated and larger hospitals were more likely to build workforce planning and development into their strategic plans, while critical access hospitals, for-profit hospitals and hospitals in the South were less likely to do so. Since workforce shortages affect safety and quality, that gap suggests that the organizations with the fewest resources may also be the least prepared to plan for their most important resource, people.

Three lessons will guide our group through this capstone. First, strategy must start with an honest analysis of the environment, not with a list of favored projects. Second, plans succeed only when people throughout the organization know the goals and how their work connects to them, which is where the regional hospital's plan fell short; its goals lived in a board binder rather than in unit meetings and performance reviews. Third, workforce planning belongs inside strategy, not beside it, as the hospital study shows. We will apply these lessons to the Middleboro cases in the coming weeks, beginning each analysis with the environment before proposing any solution. A list of projects is not a strategy; a strategy is the reason some projects make the list and others do not.

Proverbs teaches that plans fail without counsel but succeed with many advisers (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 15:22). Our group's four perspectives are a small version of that principle, and good strategic management builds the same kind of counsel into an organization through broad participation in planning.

Reply to Group 3

Group 3, your thread argued that formal strategic planning is mainly useful for large organizations and that small physician practices can rely on informal decisions by the owners. We agree that a small practice does not need a large planning department, but we think it still needs the core steps. Moseley (2018) presents strategic management as a process that can be scaled to an organization's size, and even a two-page plan with a mission, a short environmental scan and three goals can keep partners from pursuing conflicting projects. Wongsin et al. (2025) found that the link between planning and performance worked largely through people and management practices, which a small practice can strengthen without much expense. Apenteng et al. (2026) found that smaller and independent hospitals integrated workforce planning into strategy less often, which suggests small organizations may be the ones most at risk from informal planning. James warns against boasting about what we will do tomorrow without acknowledging that the future is uncertain (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, James 4:13-15), and a simple plan with regular review is one practical way to hold intentions humbly. Would your practice consider a one-page plan reviewed each quarter by the partners? Even that small step would give the practice a shared reference point when new opportunities arise.

Reply to Group 5

Group 5, your thread described a hospital whose strategic plan was impressive on paper but forgotten within a year, and you asked how to keep a plan alive. Our group saw the same problem at one member's regional hospital, where few managers could name the plan's goals a year after it was approved. Moseley (2018) emphasizes that strategy implementation and control are as much a part of strategic management as plan development, which means a plan needs owners, measures and regular review. Clark et al. (2026) surveyed pharmacy leaders in U.S. health systems and found that most strategic plans that respondents described included goals, actions for each goal and an accountable person or team, and most were revisited at least annually, practices that likely help keep plans active. Wongsin et al. (2025) also identified evaluation tools as one of the factors contributing to organizational development. Habakkuk was told to write the vision plainly so that a person could run with it (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Habakkuk 2:2), which suggests that clarity and visibility are part of what makes a vision usable. Would your hospital benefit from a one-page summary of the plan posted on every unit, with quarterly updates on progress toward each goal? Visible progress tends to keep leaders accountable and staff engaged.

References

Apenteng, B. A., Opoku, S. T., Anokye-Mensah, S., Puobebe, C., Boakye, K. G., Kimsey, L., Peden, A. H., & Owens, C. F. (2026). Rural-urban differences in the incorporation of workforce planning and development in the strategic planning process of US hospitals. The Journal of Rural Health, 42(2), e70168. https://doi.org/10.1111/jrh.70168

Clark, J. S., Behring Vlasimsky, T., Fera, T., & Nussbaum, B. B. (2026). Survey of pharmacy strategic planning and execution in US health systems. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/ajhp/zxag060

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Moseley, G. B., III. (2018). Managing health care business strategy (2nd ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Wongsin, U., Pannoi, T., Prutipinyo, C., Maruf, M. A., Pongpattrachai, D., Quansri, O., & Sattayasomboon, Y. (2025). Strategic planning and organizational performance in public health sector: A scoping review. BMC Health Services Research, 25(1), 1017. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-025-13206-6