Do you run a hospital or clinic and need a competitor SWOT analysis? If YES, here is a detailed sample SWOT analysis for healthcare centers and hospitals.
If you run a healthcare center or hospital or you intend starting one, then one of the things you need to do to get it right from the onset is to carry out thorough and detailed SWOT analysis for the business.
Why Do You Need a SWOT Analysis Report?
This is because the healthcare industry is not one of those industries that give room to mediocrity. The hospital and healthcare industry comprise of operators who are licensed as general medical and surgical hospitals that provide surgical and nonsurgical diagnostic and medical treatment to inpatients with medical conditions. In general, medic clinics maintain inpatient beds and usually provide other services such as outpatient services, operating room services and pharmacy services.
There is indeed a very large market for healthcare service providers in the united states and of course in most parts of the world. For instance, the World Health Organization (W.H.O) estimated that there are about 9.2 million physicians, 19.4 million nurses and midwives, 1.9 million dentists and other dentistry personnel, 2.6 million pharmacists and other pharmaceutical personnel, and over 1.3 million community health workers worldwide. This goes to show that the healthcare industry is indeed one of the largest segments of the workforce of any nation.
Results from studies conducted in the United States of America shows that in 2011, healthcare costs paid to hospitals, physicians, nursing homes, diagnostic laboratories, pharmacies, medical device manufacturers and other players in the healthcare system business value chain, consumed an estimated value of 17.9 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States.
This indeed is the largest of any country in the world. As a matter of fact, experts projected that the healthcare share of the GDP of the United States will continue to grow, reaching 19.6 percent of GDP by 2016.
The truth is that if you are going to achieve the goals that you have set for your business, then you must ensure that you build your business on a solid foundation. You must ensure that you follow due process as it relates to setting up a business or running the business hence the need to work with a detailed SWOT analysis.
What is a SWOT Analysis?
A SWOT analysis is an advanced strategic planning model that helps businesses and organizations identify where they are doing well and where they can improve, both from an internal and external perspective. SWOT is an acronym with S representing “Strengths”, W representing “Weaknesses”, O representing “Opportunities”, and T representing “Threats”
Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the organization, while opportunities and threats are of external origin. Strengths and opportunities are helpful to your organization’s strategy, and weaknesses and threats are harmful to your organization’s strategy.
When it comes to coming up with a SWOT analysis for your organization, you would need to involve top managerial staff members and other key stakeholders whose inputs may go a long way to help you structure and position your business or organizations for growth and profitability. As a matter of fact, it is advisable to engage the services of a business consultant who is an expert in this regard.
A Detailed SWOT Analysis for Healthcare Centers and Hospitals
- Strengths
Our strength as a player in the Healthcare Center and Hospital industry is that we have a team of qualified healthcare professionals manning various job positions in our healthcare center cum hospital. As a matter of fact, they are some of the best hands in the whole of city where our hospital is located.
Our location, the Business model we operate (opening 24 hours daily and 7 days in a week) multiple payment options, well equipped medical call center, continuous training and retraining of our workforce and our excellent customer service culture will definitely count as a strong strength for us.
- Financial Strengths: Our most reliable source of financial growth is our current clientele base and business network. We are in partnership with HMOs and Medicare insurance companies and of course our service fee structure is structured in such a way that we can comfortably accommodate patients paying from their pocket and those paying via health insurance. With that, we are rest assured that we will continue to generate income for the business.
- Customer Strengths: Our customer growth will be coming from referrals and from HMOs and Medicare insurance companies.
- Internal Strengths: What we do very well as an organization is our capacity to treat various sicknesses and carry out various surgery procedures and we have access to top consultants in different field in the healthcare industry.
Weaknesses
The healthcare industry is one industry that requires huge cash to be able to acquire top medical equipment and also to hire the services of some of the finest consultants in the industry, hence our perceived weaknesses could be our capacity to access the required cash to handle the above stated concerns.
- Financial Weaknesses: Our biggest financial weakness could be that most of our customers are in a cyclical industry and subject to market whims.
- Customer Weaknesses: As a new business, part of our business weakness is the fact that we may not be able to leverage on economy of scales to be able to beat down the prices of services and products; we would have loved to give our customers the lowest price they can get within our location.
- Internal Weaknesses: As a new business that is still trying to establish its presence in the healthcare industry, we cannot rule out the fact that we have not been able to get a proper handle on our database to make it seamless especially as it relates to one-touch call resolution for customer service.
- Learning and Growth Weaknesses: Our biggest challenges with employees are that we have not been able to get a proper handle on how to secure the services of the best hands in our organization. This is because most of the top professionals would always want to go for the highest bidder and since we are new in the industry, we don’t have the capacity yet to compete with big fishes in the industry is terms of attracting and hiring senior consultants and health workers who have made names for themselves in the industry.
Opportunities
The opportunities that are available to hospitals cum healthcare services providers are unlimited considering the fact that medical clinics are not only meant for those who are sick and need treatment; people who are not sick may be required to conduct routine medical checkups from time to time and we are going to position our medical clinic to make the best out of the opportunities that will be available to us in and around our location of operations.
- Financial Opportunities: Our biggest opportunity to improve our finances is starting a new service line (we will also adopt alternate medicine when treating some ailments, increasing customer retention, and launching after a new geographical area via franchising and opening our hospital facilities.
- Customer Opportunities: We know of the vast opportunities that is available to the healthcare and hospital industry, hence we will work hard to continue to improve our online interface, cross-selling related health products, and work hard to better understanding our customers’ services requirements and how to handle them.
- Internal Opportunities: We have put processes in place that will help us drive the business into the future and we will continue to improve upon them. As a result of that, we will go all out to partner with specialist and teaching hospitals within and outside of city.
- Learning and Growth Opportunities: One of the opportunities we have to leverage is our ability to make available cross-training opportunities for all our staff members. We will also come up with seasonal vocational sponsorship packages to improve our corporate culture and thus our staff retention.
Threats
An unstable federal reimbursement model amid an uncertain regulatory environment will likely present a threat to a business such as ours. Although federal funding for Medicare and Medicaid is expected to increase in 2018, continuing reimbursement pressure and regulatory uncertainty will remain a potential threat to the healthcare services industry.
Another threat that may likely confront us is the arrival of a new and bigger/well established healthcare center, medical clinic or hospital in same location where ours is located.
- Financial Threats: One of threats that could seriously impact our financial health in our business could be low-cost competitors, a partner entering into our market space, or an overseas player establishing their presence where we generated the largest income for the business.
- Customer Threats: Our biggest concern about our customers is that one of our competitors offer zero-fee checking and once in a while free medical treatments and that could steal some of our market share.
- Internal Threats: Our business is built without recourse to future partnership especially from alternate service providers like chiropractic clinics, Ayurveda clinics and Naturopathy clinics, and with the look of things, this decision might affect us in the future because the trend is gradually shifting to alternate medicine; people are rapidly embracing natural medicine and treatment.
- Learning and Growth Threats: One thing that could threaten the people within our organization is fast rate at which technology becomes obsolete and this could lead to a drop in the drive for continuous learning and resulting to pushback against new technology.
In conclusion,
We know that SWOT analysis is not an end product— it is the first step to helping us align our strategy around the areas we have identified as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. We will go all out to put some measures in place to track progress on our weaknesses and seizing our opportunities.
Going forward, we will put structures and processes in place that will help consolidate our results so we can see all the positive opportunities—and any negative trends—that could affect our strategy, and how we operate on the whole.
We are prepared to take action on our SWOT analysis and we will make use of our SWOT analysis as an input for developing or further refining our strategic plan for our healthcare center. As we start implementing the strategies highlighted, we will build programs to help overcome our weaknesses and of course, go after our opportunities.