Scenario Planning Approach to Adapting in the COVID Era

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES: 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. MATERIALS AND METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSION: 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.