O’Brien led the owner of this 8-practice medical group and his management team through a structured brainstorming and strategy development process to create a "roadmap" for the business. A key objective was to identify areas for growth of the existing practices as well as to provide a conceptual foundation for a new practice model embracing the Medical Home concept. During this process, we began with a pragmatic SWOT analysis of the existing businesses as well as an identification of Stakeholder (in this case, the owner’s) objectives for the businesses over the coming 3-years. We created a set of business strategies and the specific actions required to support those strategies. The primary objective was to develop a Plan and commensurate actions which were practical in terms of the realities of regional healthcare supply & demand, expected changes in the industry’s regulatory environment as well as the payers’ structure and behavior.

Our goals were to identify required changes in how business will be done in the future, which will require internal shifts in resources and direction. We identified the key opportunities for increased income and profitability, pinpointed potential roadblocks, established clear business-outcome objectives as well as the critical actions which would be required to achieve the Plan.

My role was to design the planning process, to conduct the facilitation and to stimulate the team's thinking. I also brought to the planning sessions examples for best-practices in business-development, operational execution and the organization of internal roles & responsibilities. The facilitation process is creative, open, interactive and stimulating to the participants’ strategic thinking and is designed to reveal the maximum business opportunities achievable, identify do-able actions and to gain “buy-in” from all those individuals who will be responsible for executing the Plan.

The fundamental building-blocks for this Plan were based on structured discussions around the following critical topics, in this order:

• Current business status
• Future market environment
• Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats for these medical practices
• Stakeholder objectives
• Business issues that are present
• Strategies to address the issues and to achieve stakeholder objectives
• Specific action-plans to support the chosen strategies
• Keys-To-Success for the Plan’s implementation over the coming 12-mos

The Santa Fe Medical Group and Atrinea Health (the medical home initiative) is a unique healthcare organization in that it has positioned its individual medical practices to be highly accessible to patients seeking care – not only in terms of convenient physical location but also in terms of the “culture of service” that the patient experiences, from the time they first contact the facility through check-out and subsequent follow-up on their health status. The organization is also unique in that they have the ability to provide the dual services of family-health, typically accompanied by an appointment, as well as urgent care which is typically walk-in services. Lastly, the practices can, for certain health needs, provide the expanded services required to support full treatment of certain health needs, such as bone-density testing, x-rays as well as orthopedic treatments.

Two immediate outcomes from this planning process were the sustainability of 20% annual growth in revenue and profit for the existing practices, aided by a lean 6-sigma process improvement transformation in operations protocols, and the launch of an initial “medical home” practice (Atrinea Health) in Mesa Arizona. The strategic plan provides for the opening of 2 additional Atrinea practices during 2011 which will be franchise operations. Approximately 10 Atrinea practices are envisioned to be launched by the end of 2012 in the states of Arizona, Texas and Colorado.