How to Effectively Grow Your Health System Footprint

Strategic growth for health systems is more challenging than ever. Planners must consider demographic shifts, economic and regulatory trends, attracting a skilled workforce, cultivating the referral network, and gaining greater market share despite an expanding competitive market. In fact, the competitive landscape has evolved to include more telemedicine programs, urgent care centers, retail clinics, a growth of ambulatory surgery centers, and more. To be successful in this environment, an evidence-based approach is needed.

That approach begins by simply asking where. When you approach your business from a location perspective and understand where things are happening, you can make better decisions to drive growth. Applying a location strategy to your health system strategic planning will help you

• Understand your market potential/market share (overall and for different service lines).
• Optimize your market and increase market share, overall revenue, and profitability with effectively designed networks (determine gaps and leakage by comparing your existing services against the market potential).
• Understand where your underperforming facilities are and why they are not performing.
• See where the service areas of key competitors overlap with your primary service area and what the profile of your patient volume is within this area. Service area calculations are made easier, even if you view your services area from multiple perspectives—from traditional to referral region to patient defined.
• Determine where growth is possible. You can consider this from many aspects: growth from existing geography and services (same facility/increased market share); growth from expanding geography and access points; and new service development—vertical and horizontal service expansion in areas that may be underserved for certain types of services.
• Explore access around a proposed location, using rings and drive-time analysis.
• Understand your existing patient base (develop overall demographic profiles and profiles for specific lines of business).
• Allocate marketing resources effectively (including areas with low penetration and target demographic profiles).
• Define the best marketing channels and the message format that will resonate and bring in your target/high-value patients.

Incorrect decisions can be costly. When you take a location-based approach combined with spatial analytics, you can make informed investment decisions, reduce losses, and make strategic gains over the competition.

Esri creates the world's most powerful mapping and analytics software. With the ArcGIS Business Analyst suite of products, you can enable your organization to give decision-makers the information necessary to execute the growth strategy. Share easy-to-understand site maps, up-to-date market potential reports, and revenue forecasts that help grow your health system footprint in ways that are best suited for your brand.

Find out more about how a location-based approach can help your organization become a results-oriented health system. See the interactive story map to learn more.