Leading, Connecting, Serving
Who We Are
The Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD), a personal membership group of the American Hospital Association, is the largest and most prominent voice and resource for healthcare provider-based planners, marketers, and communications/public relations practitioners nationwide. SHSMD hosts the largest and most comprehensive annual conference, with over 1000 attendees. We offer such unique and respected staples as the annual Futurescan environmental assessment and the By the Numbers benchmarking study, as well as three listservs, electronic and print newsletters, a job posting service, and other valuable resources. More than 4,400 healthcare strategy professionals have chosen to become members of SHSMD, reflecting our singular status in the field.
Our Mission--Why we exist
The mission of the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, a personal membership group of the American Hospital Association, is to provide healthcare planning, marketing, and communications professionals with the most highly valued resources for professional development.
Launching a New Brand Promise--Where we are going
As a reflection of the changing healthcare environment and the intensifying pressures on healthcare strategy professionals, and in response to comprehensive research on our members’ needs, SHSMD is proud to unveil a new brand promise. Through the process of listening to our members, as well as thoughtful introspection, we have clarified who we are and where we desire to go as an organization.
Our members told us how we could serve them better, and we plan to deliver. We have opened a dialogue with our members that we plan to keep open on an ongoing basis to continue to add value to SHSMD membership.
SHSMD’s brand promise reflects a renewed commitment to our members, along with newly developed resources that will empower our members to perform at a higher level. By launching new resources—such as special interest group communities, back-to-basics workshops, and expanded benchmarking and best-practice studies—while retaining the best of current resources, SHSMD intends to demonstrate a heightened sense of responsiveness to members’ need for just-in-time resources.
Providing help when needed
SHSMD is a pragmatic, timely resource that impacts its members’ success today. To accomplish this, SHSMD resources will focus on the here and now, providing our members with the specific help they need, when they need it.
Providing connections
In today’s fast-paced and increasingly complicated world, healthcare strategy professionals need to be connected. They need connections to colleagues who’ve faced the problems they face, connections to leading-edge ideas and information, and connections to the resources of one of the nation’s most powerful healthcare organizations. SHSMD promises to meet these needs by connecting its members to networking resources around the country and in their local communities through our robust network of over 3,900 national members; to leading-edge ideas, best practices, and benchmarking resources; to the latest information about market trends; and to the resources of the American Hospital Association.
Our Brand Promise--How we serve our members
The Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development responds to the needs of its diverse membership by providing a broad and constantly changing array of products, experiences, and connections in a just-in-time environment from a known and trusted partner. SHSMD offers its members the help they need, when they need it, by linking them directly to available resources targeted to their specific needs. Like its parent organization, the American Hospital Association, which serves as the national voice of hospitals, healthcare networks, and other care providers, the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development will continue to be a candid, realistic, and credible voice for the strategy professionals who work in those organizations.
Our Guarantee
The Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development seeks to provide exceptional products and services and won’t be happy until its members are. If any SHSMD products, programs, or services do not fulfill our brand promise, we will make the situation right.
March 2006
