Strategy & Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is an essential business process for health and human service provider organizations. A strategic plan provides clarity and transparency from the board on performance expectations and priorities and serves as the overall foundation for organizational infrastructure development and operating plans. However, strategy is only one factor of the overall strategic planning process. Rather, strategy and strategic planning require a scenario-based, tactical, and detailed implementation and execution plan with the right management team and performance metrics to ensure the organization is progressing toward its strategic initiatives. Amid changing reimbursement models, consumerism, and other market disruptors, a strategic plan that is both market-focused and nimble is key for sustainability in an uncertain future.

Latest Resources

• Building Cultures Of High Reliability: Lessons From The High Reliability Organization Paradigm
• High Reliability
• The $18.6 Billion Bump: Best Of The 2026 OPEN MINDS Service Excellence Institute
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• Integrated Behavioral Health In Action: Lessons From Kaiser Permanente’s Whole Person Care Model
• Beyond The Launch: Embedding Behavioral Health In Emergency Departments
• Portfolio Management To Optimize Organizational Performance: The 2026 OPEN MINDS Executive Seminar On How To Build A Service Line Portfolio For The Future
• Is Your Plan A Block Of Paper?
• What’s The Plan?
• How To Make $50 Billion Matter 
• Who’s Paying The Tab? The Best Of The 2026 OPEN MINDS Government Health & Human Services Executive Summit
• The Future Of Smart Living: Technology As The Foundation For I/DD Services With Brian Hart, Founder & Chief Executive Officer Of ShiftAbility
• It’s The Planning

Diversify Or Die

The current strategy challenge for health and human service executive teams is to figure out how to grow, and whether those investments in growth should be gradual expansions of current services or a giant step outside of current geographies or payers. That issue is fundamental to strategic plans for the next few years (see Scenario-Based Strategic Planning: The OPEN MINDS Management Newsletter, December 2025). Most executives realize that “diversify or die” is a management adage… Read

• Improving Patient Experience To Improve Financial Performance: A Discussion With Warren Bates, Chief Executive Officer Of Mend
• Correcting The Mistakes That Undermine Strategy Execution: The Adelphoi Case Study
• Managing Permacrisis: Best Of The 2026 OPEN MINDS Strategy & Innovation Institute
• Sustaining Independence – The Financial Future Of Nonprofit Behavioral Health Organizations: A Discussion With Bruce White, Chief Executive Officer Of Johnson, Kendall, & Johnson
• Leading Through The Chaos

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