Growth strategy for outsourced hospitalist company

A leading hospitalist company was seeking additional growth and evaluating long-term strategic alternatives to maintain a differentiated offering in the marketplace.The overall hospitalist market is large and growing, due to increasing acceptance from community physicians, demand from hospitals for new programs and expansion of existing programs, and a growing realization that insourced solutions have drawbacks.To determine our client’s current market positioning and growth opportunities, we spoke with current and past customers as well as potential customers. Through this process we gained a thorough understanding of customer needs, level of satisfaction, performance metrics, and operational considerations. This formed the basis of a market model of size and growth of the hospitalist industry. We further segmented this analysis to represent market potential by geography, size, and hospital type/ownership. In addition, we analyzed the competitive landscape and evaluated our client’s market positioning and differentiation.We made specific recommendations in many areas across the business. Within sales and marketing, we helped the client refine and improve its value proposition to target hospitals and to incorporate our hospital segmentation database into sales planning efforts and marketing materials. In product development, we recommended that the client evolve its existing product offerings to address emerging issues (e.g., public reporting of quality and patient satisfaction, IT optimization). From a human resources perspective, we analyzed the labor supply and trends and made specific suggestions on how to bolster physician recruiting and retention. Lastly, we identified and profiled several acquisition targets.