Perhaps one of the most popular topics within the walls of healthcare businesses today, due to the ever-increasing amount of competitive pressure in the market, is how to maximize facility performance to grow market share.
So, if you’re a healthcare organization and you have a growing number of competitors on each of your different service lines, how do you plan on competing?
In this series, we’ll detail how you can maximize your existing facilities even in an era of increasing competition and shrinking budgets.
The First Step is the Hardest
The first step in this endeavor is to change the way you view your facilities. Your facilities are much more than just independent locations; they form a portfolio of assets. Like any asset, your real estate portfolio produces value for your organization, but must be utilized correctly in order to maximize that value.
So how can you manage your portfolio of locations in a way that maximizes the value and drives overall organization performance? The key is to take a data-driven approach to evaluate each location based on three main factors, which we will discuss in more detail in the rest of this series:
- Is the facility in the right location? You may have a great facility with outstanding services, but if it is in the wrong location you won’t be able to capture the market demand from your best patients.
- Are you offering the right services at the facility? Perhaps that primary care clinic is actually in the perfect location for urgent care services and would produce a better ROI if it offered both.
- Are you marketing to the right people around each facility? Not everyone who lives in the facility’s trade area is your patient. You need to understand who is likely to visit your facility so you can market to the correct households.
The Bottom Line
As the retailization of healthcare continues, we’ll see consumers make healthcare related choices more similarly to how they make retail choices.
Given that, your real estate portfolio will become an incredibly important element of how you position yourself to potential patients. The better you can optimize your facilities to meet the demand for particular service lines at each of your locations, the better you can out-position your competition, market to your prospects and ultimately, achieve your organization’s objectives.
In the next post in this series we’ll talk about how you can increase efficiency and effectiveness by aligning your resources with demand and how that translates into assessing your facility site locations.
Don’t want to wait until the next post? Talk to us today to get a crash course in how a data-driven solution can help you get the most out of your existing facilities.