GHPC’s Online Guided Planning Tool Aids Professionals in Strategic Planning
Public health leaders at local, state, and national levels are dealing with a sea change in the goals for and implementation of public health. And with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (health reform), they have questions, many of which are being asked for the first time.
“The role of public health – even without health reform – is changing. Its mission is moving more towards population health,” says Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) analyst Glenn M. Landers. “It is becoming more about public health’s roles in assurance, assessment, and convening, and less about direct, individual services.
“Given this redirection, the role of public health departments and clinics is changing. Our contacts in the national policy office were concerned that, as they traveled the country, they saw many people in public health professions with lots of questions and no one answering.”
In response, Landers and other researchers at the GHPC developed a planning tutorial and interactive toolkit, “Leading through Health System Change: A Public Health Opportunity,” that offers public health professionals a new way to strategically plan for the future. It is supported by the National Network of Public Health Institutes and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The Affordable Care Act impacts almost all aspects of the U.S. health care system, from financing and quality to coverage and access,” says GHPC Director Karen Minyard. “Public health officials are in a unique position to think strategically about how they should function moving forward.
Minyard helped plan and now promotes the toolkit. “This planning tool is a launching pad for leaders to begin to think adaptively, have important conversations and plan strategically with their teams.”
The toolkit does not provide answers, but rather, shows public health officials how to develop new, strategic actions to address public health’s challenges through a five-step planning process.
Its guided planning approach walks users through one of three questions about the role of public health and through research related to the question selected. It then leads them to the analysis and strategic thinking they must do to arrive at a conclusion.
“The key to shifting how we think about public health is in understanding that most of the challenges in health care today are adaptive challenges, and yet we try to fix them with technical solutions. But there are no ideal solutions yet, no existing approaches that have already been designed and adopted,” says Landers.
Adaptive solutions require experimentation and innovation. The idea behind the guided practice approach used in the toolkit, he continues, is that it teaches users to learn a new process about how to approach the questions they have, in this case, health care reform or health system change.
“You give them a few examples to work through – individually or as a team – to get the process down. The idea is that if they go through the process, the five steps, they’ll be better equipped to handle adaptive challenges and lead with an adaptive mindset.
“We want public health leaders who are better prepared to lead in a changing environment,” he says.
By March 2014, more than 600 users from 49 states had registered to use the toolkit.
“Its impact is being felt all over,” says Landers. “We’ve presented it to many audiences. There are hundreds of public health leaders engaged around it.”
But he measures the tool’s ultimate success in those who have used it to learn this new way of thinking.
“Public health professionals who have used this planning tool are better equipped to answer questions on their own. They are not paralyzed by the uncertainty that health reform brings. They can move forward more confidently with this adaptive mindset,” he says.
“Leading through Health System Change” is available on the web in both online and printed workbook forms. Go to www.acaplanningtool.com to learn more.
By Jennifer Giarratano, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies