Bridging Worlds: The Future Role of the Healthcare Strategist - Implications

• Be Nimble to Exceed the Rate of Change - Healthcare strategists need to evolve as fast as the external environment. They must frame problems, ask provocative questions, and move the organization to action.

• Tell Stories. Create Experiences - Understanding needs and motivations to compel storytelling and intentionally designing experiences is a critical part of influencing consumer behavior.

• Integrate and Co-Create - The healthcare strategist must facilitate conversations within multi-layered and complex organizations, create coalitions, and seek out a diversity of inputs.

• Erase Boundaries of Business - Strategists must help develop accessible, integrated systems of care, assembled through creative means such as partnerships and technology.

• Generate Data-Driven Insight - Data is only valuable if it can deliver insights and better decisions, and strategists have a role in identifying the best tools to collect, interpret, and communicate information.

Note: In Bridging Worlds, the term “strategist” refers simultaneously to planning, marketing, communications, physician relations, and business development professionals. Whether discovering ways to differentiate and focus, or shaping the future of an organization more globally, our working assumption is that the practice of strategy is universal, though the application of strategy is likely specific to each particular discipline.