Directional strategies are the essential aspects or approaches that guide strategists make critical organizational decisions. The primary directional strategies include vision, mission, goals, and values. Vision statement creates a mental image of the organization to the society and the entire public. On the other hand, the mission statement highlights the organization’s distinctive reason or purpose for existing in a given environment and distinguishes it from others of its type. The organization’s scope of operations in goods, services, and the market is identified from the mission statement. Strategic goals are the results or benchmarks associated with success factors (Ginter et al., 2018). Lastly, the organization’s core values are the fundamental guiding principles that shape its culture amongst its members and stakeholders. On the contrary, strategic alternatives are the intellectual curiosity of gathering, organizing, and analyzing information accompanied by the willingness to be and remain open to creative thoughts, ideas, and solutions that last in the long term.
Asian Health Services (AHS) has multiple directional strategies and strategic alternatives available for various organizational uses. According to the case, AHS’s mission is to advocate for the medically unserved and ensure equality in providing and access to adequate healthcare services to everyone in the Asian community, including refugees and immigrants regardless of their culture, language, insurance status, and income. It is driven by the inadequacy of healthcare services in the Asian community and other societies. For example, Obamacare, popularly known as the Affordable Care Act, requires all legal Americans to have healthcare coverage (Chung & Chin, 2015). AHS’s vision is to improve healthcare quality and promote health equity in Asia. The organizational value is to remain a not-for-profit operation. The AHS’s strategic goal is to strive to successfully adjust to the changing demographics, the free market economy, and the consumers’ preferences. AHS’s primary strategies include acquiring new electronic healthcare records, establishing an AHS care model, initiating extensive clinical education campaigns, and strengthening stakeholder bonds.
Selected Strategies
First, the new healthcare records would be connected with Obama’s Affordable Care Act policies to ensure compliance. It would help mission pursuit by facilitating easy and equal treatment of patients regardless of the third nationality, culture, language, insurance status, and income (Kimberly et al., 2014). Secondly, the new AHS care model would involve recruiting nurses, physicians, case managers, health coaches, mental health specialists, and counselors. The team must have the stated core values and focus on improving the patient’s overall health to achieve AHS’s mission, vision, and goals. Thirdly, AHS would initiate clinical education through healthcare and disease prevention experts. A good example is the plan to use the teamlet model to train medical assistants (Wilkinson et al., 2017). For the last strategy to strengthen shareholders, AHS would connect it to its goals, vision, and mission through active involvement of patients in the healthcare staff and the entire Asian community in the frontline in running and improving the healthcare systems. For example, AHS seeks to open up communication and call for employee unions to ally with the management.
Implementation
AHS implemented the selected Strategies and strategic plans through various means that were deemed worthy of the organizational investment. First, the organization began by introducing and treating uninsured patients, launching a primary healthcare revolution, inventing a new delivery system, pushing for accessible health services, primary prevention, comprehensive and patient-centered care. For example, in 2014, eight thousand uninsured patients were treated in the new healthcare model and Act (Le et al., 2017). Other implementation methods included education where the AHS organization used the Teamlet model alongside retraining nurses, hiring, recruiting, developing fresh graduates, and implementing a pilot site for state-level programs.
References
Chung, K., & Chin, W. N. (2015). Asian Health Services: Rediscovering a Blue Ocean. Web.
Ginter, P. M., Duncan, W. J., & Swayne, L. E. (2018). The strategic management of health care organizations. John Wiley & Sons.
Kimberly, S.G., Chang, J.J, Phyllis, P., and Kwee, S., (2014). “Opening access for Burmese and karen immigrant and refugee populations in California : A blueprint for integrated health service expansion to emerging Asian communities.” AAPI Nexus, 12, no. 1 and 2.
Le, H., Hirota, S., Liou, J., Sitlin, T., Le, C., & Quach, T. (2017). Oral health disparities and inequities in Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. American journal of public health, 107(S1), S34-S35.
Wilkinson, G. W., Sager, A., Selig, S., Antonelli, R., Morton, S., Hirsch, G., & Wachman, M. (2017). No equity, no triple aim : Strategic proposals to advance health equity in a volatile policy environment. American journal of public health, 107(S3), S223-S228.