TriCentral PC Toolkit : Chapter 3: Building A Palliative Care Program : Craft a business plan

To "sell" your program idea to administrators and financial officers, you will need a business plan, which outlines the new program's prospects, identifying both potential risks and benefits. A business plan gives you a format for presenting the work you have accomplished in a professional manner that lends credibility to the project. Here is where you report the findings from your needs assessment, outline your program's goals, and describe its procedures and policies. Here is also where you discuss the implementation process, including strategies for overcoming potential obstacles. Information pertaining to finances, program evaluation, and quality management—topics addressed in chapters 5 and 6 of this toolkit—should also be presented in the business plan.

Before you start writing, gather all the information you want to report in the business plan and then draft an outline. This checklist will help get you started:

Organizational description, including name, location, mission, patient population
Management and organization, including organizational chart, key management, consultants, and advisors
Justification for a palliative care program, including results from your needs assessment
Services and implementation plan, including operations plan, policies and procedures, and program evaluation and quality management plan
Marketing plan, including marketing materials
Financial information, including budget, reimbursement streams, and other funding sources

It is best to wait and write the beginning of the business plan — the executive summary — after you have written all other parts. While a complete business plan may run 30-40 pages, the executive summary should be no more than two pages; it is the business plan in the most concise form possible. The primary purpose of the executive summary is to entice busy administrators to delve further into the details of the business plan.

The Center for the Advancement for Palliative Care (CAPC) offers additional tools for drafting business plans. Visit their Web site at www.capc.org.

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For more information about the TriCentral Palliative Care Toolkit visit www.growthhouse.org/palliative/. All content is Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Richard D. Brumley, M.D. All rights reserved. No part of this toolkit may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publishers. This guide to developing home-based outpatient palliative care services was developed through a grant to the Kaiser Permanente TriCentral Service Area from The Project on Death In America. The Kaiser Permanente TriCentral Palliative Care Program is a Sustaining Member of the Inter-Institutional Collaborating Network On End-of-life Care (IICN) which links major organizations internationally.