EDPC Volume 3: Aligned Planning Strategies and Collaborative Visioning

Health Facility Master Planning is Aligning Strategy with the Facility. To compete and prosper in providing health care to the communities your organization serves, you must have a focused strategic approach. Your facilities must fully align to ensure efficiency and productivity at all levels of care and logistics.

Alignment of strategic and facility objectives means that your sites and facilities are positioned and timed to support the offensive. Conversely, defensive positions require competition, reimbursement, demographic, and technology changes in the future for your health system to prosper and serve your mission.

It is not adequate to have a strategy without facility alignment; that is like using the wrong edge of a saw. You go through the motions, expending energy and funds while making no progress, leading to less than optimal results. Alignment is critical.

A site and facility master plan is a flexible guide to the development of the campus, a group of clinical departments, a single department, or a satellite facility. In each case, the institution benefits by professionally managing one of the most expensive assets in its arsenal, its facilities, and real estate.

By simply knowing the priorities for facility refurbishing, renovations, and new construction, the institution can more effectively plan to spend its funds wisely. Quality planning will minimize wasting funds on projects only to demolish them to accomplish more pressing ones.

Our approach to Aligned Planning focuses on developing project priorities plus clinical needs based on historical and projected utilization through a collaborative process of data gathering, analysis, strategic alignment, conceptualization, and visioning. As a result, health care institutions can no longer afford to be reactive or arbitrary when spending funds on facilities.

We trust that you will gain valuable information from the contents of this volume. It is essential to note the professional fees for a site and facility master plan will pay for themselves in less than one year, a very justifiable investment in the aligned facilities of your future.