Healthcare is changing. Perhaps you are experiencing it first hand.

HCO Strategies assists physician groups, hospitals, health systems, academic medical centers adapt to emerging trends through strategic planning, business development and marketing services. Our expertise spans more than 25 years in cities across the nation.

If you need to analyze and synthesize your market, grow a medical practice, launch a specialty center, re-engineering business development and marketing strategies or strengthen a brand, contact HCO Strategies for project or long-term services.

Journalists seeking background/comment on healthcare and business, the push for broad-based quality or emerging healthcare trends, click here.

Leveraging clinical information, demographic and segmentation mapping, competitor analysis and statistical modeling, we estimate the demand for a health service or location. This is especially useful before developing a strategy for an expensive facility or expanding an existing one. This is also insightful in determining if your existing service is underperforming.

What course should you chart? How are you going to respond to competitor's actions? Strategic plans provide a framework for moving forward, from how to make the decision on how to proceed to the actions that need to be taken. HCO strategies' collaborative and integrative processes are designed to work with your cross-functional teams (physicians, department managers, senior management and board). Our plans are realistic, presentatable to the highest management levels and implemented by your internal personnel, HCO Strategies or as a combined effort.

Business development activities are fundamental to success. HCO Strategies will identify potential physician and strategic business partners, provide initial negotiation with third parties or flesh out the businesses' internal components from new physician specialists or patient flow to staffing projections.

Business plans are developed and implemented through collaborative efforts with clinicians, directors, and physician and senior leadership. This integrative approach in business development synthesizes data-driven market/competitor analyses while applying intuition and creativity. Organizations find this especially useful when your senior-most executives are already pressed for time. HCO Strategies provides that necessary, strategic partnering.

Marketing plans are the framework for an integrated document covering strategy, marketing communications, public/media relations, internal communications and critical tactics for success. Modeling is built to measure "ROSI - Return on Strategic Investment (s)", ensuring that dollars allocated for marketing plan implementation give you the desired results. Marketing outlines can be implemented by internal personnel, by HCO Strategies' team members or jointly.

Marketing communications is an outgrowth of strategy. Eliminate the difficulties in message creation, ad/pr planning, and negotiations with printers and media by having the experienced HCO Strategies team shape your message and create your materials. Services include comprehensive marketing communication plans, branding, and service-specific communications to consumers, physicians and employers.

Don't let the ball get dropped while an executive in strategy, business development or marketing is being recruited and hired. HCO Strategies believes that "Progress through Process" is critial in keeping initiatives on track during the recruitment period. Leverage the expertise of HCO Strategies to assist in reviewing decisions that need to be made, make objective recommendations and manage projects in the interim.

HCO Strategies' Principal Cyndi L. Nidiffer is a nationally recognized expert in healthcare strategy, business development and marketing. She has almost 30 years experience which included senior positions in a multi-location medical practice and several integrated health systems. Nidiffer's driving interests are emerging trends and strategic solutions.  Cyndi is a founding member of The Executive Strategy Cluster, a national organization that studies emerging HC trends.

She often works with journalists who need background on the hospital industry and trends that impact healthcare as a business. Read examples from 2005 media here.

Nidiffer directs an experienced group that flexes to meet a client's specific challenges. Tell us more about what you need accomplished here.

Hello. I’m Cyndi Nidiffer….principal of HCO Strategies.

You know how much pressure health care organizations are under……

The push for measurable quality……
Rising customer expectations……
The need to grow.

HCO Strategies helps physician groups….. Hospitals ….and health systems adapt to emerging trends and identify new opportunities.

Our comprehensive suite of services in strategic planning…..
business development ….and marketing can give you the edge.

If you have a strategic question….contact us.

Thank you.

Charlotte Business Journal

IN DEPTH: HEALTH CARE
From the January 28, 2005 print edition

All smiles at the hospital

Health-care providers go to great lengths to make sure patients are satisfied Laura Williams-Tracy Sending patients home on the road to recovery is not the only goal of hospitals in today's competitive market.

A host of functions that hospitals also perform -- making sure the nursing staff was friendly, the food appetizing and the recovery room clean -- is getting far more attention as providers make sure patients aren't tempted to visit a competitor for future care.

"Every company is looking at customer satisfaction levels these days -- have you bought a new car lately?" says Pat Taylor, vice president at Carolinas Medical Center.

Assuming all clinical standards are met, hospitals are increasingly making patient satisfaction a high priority, coming to the conclusion that the perception of quality is just as important as more technical measures of it. In short, hospital administrators are realizing the patient really is the best judge of whether his needs are being met.

And from the hospitals' viewpoint, satisfied patients mean quicker recoveries and fewer medical malpractice lawsuits. There's a direct correlation between satisfied patients and employees: Top-notch care means employees are happy, and that in turn creates savings from low employee turnover.

"We know that part of our evaluation comes with every patient by how they interact with our staff, how our facility looks and smells," says Colleen Hole, manager of customer service at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte. "Patients assume they are going to get safe care. It's about how they are treated."

Hospitals used to include a written questionnaire with discharge paperwork. But that data was hardly reliable, mostly because the few patients that responded were either extremely happy or unhappy, says Karen Chandler, director of physician and patient relations at Presbyterian Hospital.

Now Presbyterian and Carolinas Medical Center contract with Professional Research Consultants, based in Omaha, Neb., to telephone a random sample of patients soon after discharge. Thousands of patients from both hospitals are contacted over the course of a year.

Patients who agree to be interviewed -- about 90% give consent -- are asked to rate from excellent to poor the quality of their experience. Questions run the gamut from whether the patient was treated with dignity and respect, kept informed about plans for care, whether the staff was friendly and responsive to their needs, any delays in seeing a doctor, room cleanliness and the quality of food.

Patients who rate services poorly are asked open-ended questions to explain why the care fell short of expectations.

Because the patients' responses are recorded digitally, hospitals are able to view their results on a Web site in almost real time.

At Presbyterian, the surveys prompted a change in how the staff is dressed. All nurses now wear navy and white, while staffers working in other departments wear a different color. The idea is to give patients an immediate sense of who is coming in and out of their rooms and for what purpose.

"We have learned that communication is the most important thing," says Hole.

Carolinas Medical Center put increased attention on food, which gets a bad rap industry-wide but has the potential to be one of the few pleasantries a patient can experience while otherwise enduring medical procedures.

"We focus on trying to deliver food in a way that it's what the patient needs to eat but it is also pleasant to look at," says Taylor, and that includes taking special requests.

Hospitals routinely announce awards from national health-care organizations for the quality of care that patients receive. CMC has been named by National Research Corp. as Charlotte's most preferred hospital for the past seven years. Presbyterian Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital Matthews each received national top honors, including some No. 1 rankings, for patient satisfaction by Professional Research Consultants. Both rankings are prestigious, but for the average patient, it's hard to compare the two institutions against one another.

The playing field may soon be leveled by a program under development by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The agency is developing a national standard for assessing patient experiences and plans to roll it out as The National Voluntary Hospital Reporting Initiative. This national database will grade hospitals, giving patients a way to make meaningful comparisons of providers.

"The competition among health-care providers is going to intensify," says Dallas-based Cyndi Nidiffer, founding member of the Executive Strategy Cluster, a national organization that studies emerging industry trends.

A former executive at Presbyterian Healthcare and Mid Carolinas Cardiology, Nidiffer notes, "consumers have more choices about where to receive care, so the delivery is becoming more retail-oriented. In a retail environment, you're going to be concerned about customer satisfaction, convenience and even cost in addition to clinical outcomes. For a system to be successful over the long term, it will have to address care with a more comprehensive, patient-oriented view."

At Presbyterian, service quality is part of every employee's yearly performance review.

"There is a direct correlation between patient satisfaction and employee satisfaction," says Chandler. "If we are taking care of employees, then they take care of patients."

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