Envisioning Results

Career Relevancy
The success of any marketing plan begins with the organizations missions and goals. By instilling its overall goals into its employees through these elements, they can build a strategic marketing plan that ultimately serves those goals. By understanding both vision and goals for any given healthcare organization, you can adapt your marketing strategy to the greater benefit of the organization and those it serves.
Background
On a Mission
The first step to understanding the best way to build a marketing strategy in healthcare is to build on the concept of mission and vision statement. A mission statement is, in short, a concise explanation of an organizations reason for existence. It expresses their purpose and overall intention while giving clear direction to employees, customers, vendors, and any other stakeholders (SHRM, 2018). In the case of the healthcare industry, the mission statement also typically gives a clear ethical stance for the practice, declaring their intentions when it comes to treatment and care, while offering some idea of how they will maintain that care.
A vision statement, on the other hand, is designed to be even more forward-lookingshowing and explaining an ideal image of what the organization wants to achieve. It is aspirational and typically answers questions such as, What problem are we seeking to solve? Where are we headed? If we achieve our goals, what will our organization look like in a decade? (SHRM, 2018). Within the healthcare industry, this kind of statement also allows the practice to offer up a vision of their ideal treatment of their patients and employees alike. By combining these two statements, a marketing expert can determine how best to sell the organization, ultimately building off of their ideals as a way to make them appealing to potential clients.
Staying On Trend
As a key part of addressing the needs of its market, any given medial practice has to understand healthcare trends, the state of the industry, and their competitors. A healthcare organization can do this best by performing a SWOT Analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Through the review, the organization can identify which of these elements can be improved uponidentifying where their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, what business opportunities they are not currently employing, and what kind of threats the competition poses.
Once the individual strengths of an organization have been identified, the next step is to commit to a marketing mix that benefits their newly established needs while still retaining their mission and vision. A typical marketing mix includes the following elements: product, price, promotional message, and place of distribution. Products might include services aimed at a specific demographic, while the other elements will fall into place behind that product. For example, a practice might determine that it can offer superior services to geriatric patients, will then establish a price that meets their needs, build messaging to attract those clients, and determine the best way to distribute that message. Once these are established an effective marketing strategy will form naturally.
References
SHRM. 2018, March 05. Mission & Vision Statements: What is the difference between mission, vision and values statements? Retrieved On July 15, 2020. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-qa/pages/isthereadifferencebetweenacompany%E2%80%99smission,visionandvaluestatements.aspx
(Links to an external site.)
Prompt
Select a healthcare system that you know of in your community. Read over the facilitys mission and vision. How might you be able to grow online appointment scheduling for this facility while still working within the mission and vision of the hospital you selected? Explain how the mission and values could be integrated into a marketing plan to expand online appointment scheduling.
For your citation, you might use articles that show key examples of healthcare mission statements. You can also find articles that help identify effective means of scheduling in the industry.

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