HLTH 4115 Week 8 New Service Proposal Paper Example

Service Proposal: The Northside Injury Clinic, What It Is, Who Staffs It, Where It Sits and What the Hospital Stops Doing to Make Room

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 4115: Strategic Planning and Marketing in Healthcare

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Service Proposal: The Northside Injury Clinic, What It Is, Who Staffs It, Where It Sits and What the Hospital Stops Doing to Make Room

The Service

The Northside Injury Clinic is a walk-in service treating sprains, fractures and other sports injuries in children and in adults under 65, operated by the hospital in the northern suburbs of the county. It provides evaluation, X-ray, splinting and casting, reduction of simple fractures and dislocations, and a follow-up visit with a hospital orthopedic surgeon within one business day when needed. It does not provide advanced imaging, surgery or care for older adults with falls, who are directed to the emergency department. Both the hospital and its county are invented composites, and the proposal leaves out cost and revenue figures that would need the hospital's own financial data.

Hours and Access

The clinic is open weekdays from noon to 9 p.m. and weekends from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. These hours cover the evening and weekend peaks found in the hospital's injury visit data and leave weekday mornings, when demand is lowest and the orthopedic group's clinic is open, to others. Patients can walk in or reserve a place in line online. The front desk can register patients in English and Spanish, the two languages most spoken in the area, and has telephone interpreting for others. A posted cash price for the visit and any X-ray appears at the entrance and online, along with a plain statement that financial help is available and how to ask for it.

Staffing

Each shift is staffed by one physician assistant or nurse practitioner with orthopedic training, one radiologic technologist, one medical assistant trained in casting and one front desk coordinator. On the busiest weekend shifts a second advanced practice clinician is added. The hospital's employed orthopedic surgeons provide remote consultation during clinic hours by phone with image sharing, and reserve two follow-up slots each business day for clinic patients. The model depends on the surgeons' agreement to those slots and to supervising the advanced practice clinicians, which is the first condition listed below.

Location and Space

The clinic will lease a ground-floor suite in a medical office building at the main intersection of the northern suburbs, near the largest youth sports complex and on a county bus route. It needs about four exam rooms, one casting room, an X-ray room meeting state radiation rules and a waiting area sized for parents with children. A ground-floor site with parking at the door matters for patients on crutches. The location puts the clinic inside the neighborhoods, which the competitor analysis identified as a gap the orthopedic group leaves.

How a Patient Reaches It

A parent whose child hurts an ankle at Saturday soccer finds the clinic through the league's injury card, a search or the hospital's website, reserves a place online and arrives within the hour. The front desk registers the child, checks insurance and offers a leaflet on the hospital's financial help program. The clinician examines the child, orders an X-ray taken in the next room and explains the result. A simple fracture is splinted and a follow-up visit is booked before the family leaves. A fracture needing a surgeon is reviewed by phone with the on-call orthopedic surgeon, who either confirms the plan or arranges an emergency department transfer. The visit note and images are in the hospital's record for the follow-up visit.

Conditions That Must Hold

Surgeon support. The employed orthopedic group must agree to remote consultation, supervision and two follow-up slots a day.

Payer contracts. Every Medicaid managed care plan in the county must include the clinic in its network before opening, consistent with the plan to serve the Medicaid segment.

Licensing and radiation approval. The state must approve the X-ray room and the clinic's license class, which also determines whether a facility charge applies.

Recruitment. At least four orthopedic advanced practice clinicians and three radiologic technologists must be hired, which the scan flagged as the hardest step.

Financial assistance. The hospital's financial assistance policy must apply at the clinic, with its availability publicized there, as federal law requires of the hospital's facilities (26 U.S.C. § 501(r)).

What the Hospital Stops Doing

To make room for the clinic, the hospital would stop three things. It would close the Saturday morning orthopedic walk-in hours at the main campus, which see few patients and draw from the same surgeons' time. It would end the billboard campaign for orthopedic surgery on the county's southern highway, whose budget would move to the clinic's launch. And it would stop routing low-acuity injury follow-up visits to the surgeons' main office, sending them instead to the clinic's follow-up slots. Each change frees time or money the clinic needs. Strategic planning texts stress that new services compete for the same limited resources as existing ones, and that a plan should say what it displaces (Ginter et al., 2018).

How Success Will Be Judged

The clinic will be judged in its first year on four measures: visits per day by hour, the share of visits from patients on Medicaid or receiving financial assistance, the time from arrival to discharge and the number of northern residents treated for low-acuity injuries in the emergency department. Marketing texts warn that a service launched without agreed measures will be judged by whatever numbers happen to be available (Berkowitz, 2017). The marketing plan will set targets for each.

Risks

The main risks are that the orthopedic group extends its hours before the clinic opens, that recruitment takes longer than planned and that the payer mix produces losses larger than the hospital will accept. The first is outside the hospital's control; the second can be reduced by recruiting before signing the lease; the third should be tested in a financial plan before approval.

None of these risks argues against the clinic on its own. Together they argue for a staged approval: surgeon agreement and payer contracts first, recruitment second and the lease last, so the hospital learns the hardest facts before it commits the most money.

References

Additional requirements for certain hospitals, 26 U.S.C. § 501(r) (2023).

Berkowitz, E. N. (2017). Essentials of health care marketing (4th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Ginter, P. M., Duncan, W. J., & Swayne, L. E. (2018). The strategic management of health care organizations (8th ed.). Wiley.