The COVID-19 pandemic and its repercussions underscored the value of strategic planning. Organizations with a sound strategic plan can quickly decide which initiatives to postpone, add, or prioritize to adapt to changing conditions.

Healthcare Strategic Planning provides guidance for every stage of strategic planning and implementation: analyzing the environment, crafting strategy, putting the plan into action, and assessing the results. It describes the crucial decisions that must be made and the preparatory steps that must be taken for effective planning.

This new edition contains the most recent research on strategic planning as well as updated best practices in light of current issues such as access to care, the national focus on health equity, and patient expectations in the wake of the pandemic. The authors have added new information on the importance of strategic thinking in management, effective stakeholder engagement, a seamless transition from planning to implementation, and ensuring strategic plan commitment.

A new section has been added to this edition that highlights key issues specific to healthcare strategic planning. Through seven concise chapters, this section covers:

• Financial-planning considerations
• Clinical and technological innovations
• Partnerships, mergers, and affiliations
• Intensifying competition
• Value-based care
• Physician enterprise
• Governance complexity

Each of these new chapters discusses its topic's history, organizational impacts, and strategic-planning implications.

Healthcare Strategic Planning equips healthcare executives with the skills necessary to prepare their organizations for inevitable changes and challenges and to navigate them successfully.