Scenario Planning Approach to Adapting in the COVID Era

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused much uncertainty and disruption in healthcare resulting in many challenges for strategic planning. Scenario planning is a tool that allows healthcare leaders to plan healthcare delivery strategies by incorporating the uncertainties into the analysis and planning process.

Variables were identified which will have major impact on the future, but whose future direction is uncertain. The extremes of these drivers were used to generate multiple scenarios. A subset of scenarios was used to evaluate potential tactics to determine which may be high yield in the face of uncertainty.

Unlike traditional strategic planning, scenario planning does not develop a single future with a path to that future. Scenario planning evaluates tactics to determine which would be helpful in specific scenarios, multiple different futures or under specific conditions.

We present a scenario planning model which can be used to determine specific tactics to accommodate the uncertainty due to variable healthcare delivery needs in the COVID-19 era.