The State Healthcare Management Company (a fictitious company) has been established to provide coordinated healthcare to state workers.  You are a new manager in this company.  Your supervisor has asked you to review your company’s mission, vision, goals and strategies.  She/he posed the following questions and has asked you to provide a report (5 – 8 pages) answering each question.  Your report should follow APA guidelines and include at least four outside resources (cited with page numbers) .

Given:
The mission of the State Healthcare Management Company is to improve access to cost-effective, quality health care services for state workers.

Our vision for the next three years includes:

• The public and government agencies are confident that our customers are being treated fairly in the determination of eligibility and benefits.
• Healthcare providers see us as proactive partners to provide preventative care to our customers.
• Turnover of key personnel is minimal, with sufficient staff education to insure compliance with new regulations.

Our values are:

•  Provide prevention and early intervention information to help customers make good health care choices.
• Negotiate with suppliers, including service providers, to achieve value for customers
• Assess, evaluate and continuously improve the quality of our work.

Our strategic goals for this year are:

• Increase the number of state workers covered to 70% of the population of state workers
• Improve Health Outcomes by linking provider payments to decreasing occurrences of the customer’s disease outbreaks
• Contain Health Care Costs by asking for specific evidence from physicians when they request payment for customer care
• Improve the long-term care service delivery system by identifying a baseline for nursing homes.

Questions:

1. Do you believe our company’s mission, vision and values statements align well?   Why or why not?
2. I noticed that the vision statement does not address diversity.  How would you change it to include diversity in hiring?
3. Understanding that the employees must actively work towards the strategic goals established, describe an activity that each of the members of the following teams should work on that are supportive of one of the strategic goals.
1. Finance
2. Marketing
3. Human Resources
4. Do our company strategic goals relate directly to our vision and values?  Why or why not?
5. What should be added to the values to address the ethics of the business?

Your supervisor also asked you to use the internet to research a recent (within the last year) article that describes the current difficulties faced by healthcare companies regarding new or impending government regulations. 

1. Summarize the article you found in 1-2 paragraphs and explain how the concepts presented in the article could affect our company.
2. Explain how the management of our company, using the mission, vision and/or values to provide guidance, should react to this issue.
3. Why is it important for healthcare companies to keep current with the competition’s strategies and new regulations? 
4. Should a healthcare company rely solely on competitive research in developing their strategies? Why or why not?  Provide sufficient detail.