Service Lines

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Effective service line management is a driving force for competitive distinction in the healthcare industry today. Hospitals that make the leap to a service-line orientation do so to become more productive, improve their quality of care, recruit physicians more effectively, and build market share. Specializing in a few service lines also allows hospitals to build a critical mass of patients in select areas and enjoy economies of scale.

By developing a focused service-line strategy, hospitals can also limit their investment in non priority areas, with savings to be found in areas ranging from marketing to new technologies. To implement successful service lines, hospital executives need to address key questions about reporting relationships, operations, planning, and tracking. This requires an ongoing process of business development and planning.

How Thomas Group Can Help

To help manage service lines, hospitals work with Thomas Group to implement real changes in organizational structure, incentive plans, physician relationships, and business development, as well as in many support functions including human resources. We make sure our clients have a deep understanding of their own economics and competitive environments. We also help them align clinical staff recruiting interests with that environment.

Thomas Group works with hospitals to differentiate themselves through an effective service line business model that defines and drives their position in today’s market. We also ensure medical staff involvement in the planning, implementation, and operation of service lines which is a significant success factor.

Additionally, we work with hospitals to:

  • Evolve a service line into a true center of excellence
  • Ensure they have the best trained staff, utilizing the right equipment
  • Put the right processes in place so they are effective and efficient
  • Benchmark results
  • Standardization
  • Conduct a full horizontal and vertical market segmentation analysis, making sure they are benchmarking with the correct hospital metrics
  • Track clinical outcomes by service line

Service line management provides the discipline and the structure to prioritize the most critical components of an organization’s services portfolio, and thus focus limited resources on the services with the greatest market and financial potential.

In the face of rising competition from specialty hospitals, physician centers, and retail clinics, Thomas Group can help implement proven techniques to develop, focus, and continually analyze your strongest core lines of business. Thomas Group’s healthcare consultants help you enhance the performance of existing services lines, expand with new growth opportunities, attract distinguished physicians, and much more. We successfully help you differentiate your organization through service line innovation requiring excellence in key areas such as strategy, operations, hospital/physician relationships, outreach, governance, and staff relations to name a few.