Organizational and strategic planning is critical for any entity or program in healthcare and public health. Managers and leadership teams should use strategic planning for their organizations and programs, addressing how they will manage resources and lead team members. Strategic planning includes goals, objectives and action steps needed to achieve the program or organization's mission.

It utilizes a step by step process with measurable variables, assessing how the organization will be effective, and look at how it will change over time. This is also applicable to programs. A component of this strategic planning is the evaluation of the organization or program, and the continuous assessments help to identify gaps, so recommendations can take place.

Recommending solutions to health issues, or solutions to organizational and program issues helps to enhance policy making processes. Program planning and policy making processes are dynamic and so recommendations change based on many factors of internal and external environmental changes.

Strategic planning promotes population health improvement. The step by step processes employed include identifying specific health issues during the needs assessment period and so a health program is developed, to meet these needs, where goals and objectives are set.

Strategic planning considers internal and external factors and with a public health program, this helps to identify gaps in a program, or issues that could arise during implementation of the program. My final project is looking at the needs of an underserved rural community, and this rural hospital's goal of increasing its services and transitioning to an electronic medical record.

The management team must consider their stakeholders, technological resources and equipment, geography, cost analysis, population health needs, feasibility of providing for these needs, and the socio-economic and health behavior status of the community they serve. Can people afford the services, do they have transportation to the facility, can they afford the technology if wanting to utilize telemedicine for example?

Strategic planning is essential in this case because many internal factors such as staff willingness to change, management competence, available financial resources and staff skills set affect the outcome.

External factors to consider during the strategic planning is workforce and economic changes, additional funding for the transitions needed, infrastructure of the community and distance from vendors. Is the program or changes feasible?

Strategic planning improves population health through program evaluation tools because of the continuous assessment of a program to see if it is meeting its goals, if not, recommended solutions are implemented; and there is constant performance measurement of the program and program managers.

I have no experience with this in public health but in a hospital I worked, I observed how the leadership strategically unfolded the plan for our transition to a new EMR; from the training of super users who in turn trained us, to the dates of trial and full conversion, to the reassessment to see if we were comfortable with the software and how this affected patient care and organizational flow. They constantly assessed every aspect of the transition from start to finish to ensure staff competence and satisfaction, to organizational flow, patient care and any affected patient outcomes.