While it takes significant effort to make a healthcare organization function successfully, the principles that guide that success are fairly straightforward. This post is a launchpad for several deep dives on this topic and, as the introduction, applies the KISS principle to assert that there are 3 domains a healthcare organization needs to succeed in to “work” (meet its mission and operate year after year):

1) Meet patients’ needs

2) Meet patients’ reasonable wants

3) Be fiscally viable.

That’s it. The magic recipe. We’ll explore each of these domains in upcoming posts but they’re a really good starting point to evaluate your own organization. If you are achieving success in all three of these domains, then you’re succeeding as an organization. If not, you’ve got some work to do. Come with me on a journey to examine the hows and whys of each of these domains. At the far end you should feel like you know how to start organizing and prioritizing your short and long term action plans… or at least understand that you need to.