How To Position Your Service Lines for Success in Today’s Marketplace

Howard Gershon

Service lines may be the mainstay of your organization, but are you using them strategically for the realities of today’s marketplace? If not, you could be missing some important potential for getting, and keeping, your patients.

Health care reform has changed the way most hospitals do business—and the impact includes an increased emphasis on value and accountability that extends through all of the levels of care.

One of the ways to survive such high demands is to create and build strong and efficient service lines that are also carefully positioned within your system so that over time they will thrive, explains Howard Gershon, FACHE, a Strategic Health Care Marketing Editorial Advisory Board member and founding principal of a management consultancy called New Heights Group in Santa Fe, N.M.

Gone are the days when service lines were viewed solely as a means to bolster a lagging bottom line. Gershon says that today, the focus of service lines has progressed to be more about “caring for people’s health,” and doing so in an efficient and effective way. Of course the financial gains will follow, since patients will be better served and more engaged by such an approach.

As a result of this shift, modern service lines are much more comprehensive than in past generations and they also have stronger leaders at the helm who better understand the business side of the
equation, Gershon explains.

For more on creating service lines that will fit into the evolving value-based landscape, click here to read the full article: Restructuring Service Lines for Success.

Best regards,
Matt Humphrey
President