by Terri Hunter-Davis
This month’s look at the School of Dentistry’s strategic plan focuses on business.
Even as an educational institution, we have a responsibility to optimize our resources — financial, material, human — to support our strategic objectives and to maximize stakeholder value. We’ve identified five key areas where our efforts are focused:
- Fiscal: In order to sustain excellence in our hallmarks — patient care, education and discovery — we must ensure sustainability of our enterprise and foster fiscal growth. Management of our financial operations addresses the former: Simply, we must increase our operational revenue at the same time we control expenses throughout the enterprise. We tie fund development to the latter: cultivating relationships with friends, alumni and colleagues; with foundations and corporations; with patients and other beneficiaries. Through these relationships, we aim to build good will that results in financial support.
- Marketing and communications: We aim to build and sustain positive brand awareness of UCSF Dental Center and the School of Dentistry. Steps already have been taken along these lines: A new website for UCSF Dental Center is scheduled to launch in the coming weeks, and the process of refreshing the school website will commence in the fall. Effective advertising campaigns have drawn new patients to UCSF Dental Center. Original digital content has highlighted our strengths in patient care, education and discovery, and new distribution channels — e-newsletters and social media, in particular — have surfaced that content to new audiences across the campus and beyond.
- Information technology: In our information-driven society, we rely on enterprise technology to support the school’s information, business and patient needs. Our goals range from maintaining and enhancing our IT infrastructure, to improving the patient experience with electronic health records (including protection of confidential patient data), to enhancing the AxiUm and Apex systems, including bridging the two systems.
- Continuous improvement: We cannot settle. We seek to empower our staff, faculty and student teams to continuously improve efficiency and effectiveness in each area of our strategic plan. We will identify priorities for improvement, and give recognition for progress. And as individuals improve their own skill sets, we aim to review and adjust our organizational structure to maximize those capabilities.
- Increase organizational planning capabilities and the effectiveness of implementation of this strategic plan: We have a strategic plan, but the work doesn’t end there. We will continue to review the plan, and the strategies we enact to achieve it. We’ll make changes if needed. Perhaps most important, we will keep you informed of how and what we’re doing to carry it out.