Phase plan template for Healthcare

The phase plan with the boundaries a provider needs: claims and targeting never inside ordinary authority, budget authority bounded by service line and conditioned on capacity, and a record that can be read against the appointment book.

Everything else is the general phase plan, unchanged. One row per area per phase, an explicit approval list, a reversal rule and a record of every change.

Write it when marketing is run by somebody other than the person clinically responsible for what is claimed, which is nearly every practice. The boundary between a media decision and a clinical one is the thing this document draws, once, in writing.

Revisit it whenever a practitioner joins or leaves, because the claims and the capacity both change.

In a practice the line between what marketing may decide and what it may not is not drawn by risk appetite. It is drawn by qualification.

Whether a service can claim an outcome, a timeframe or a comparison is a clinical judgement. Editing a cleared claim produces a new claim, which means delegating the edit delegates the judgement, and that is not a permission anybody in marketing should be asked to hold.

Targeting sits alongside it for a different reason: the restrictions come from platform policy rather than from preference, and an audience adjusted quickly by somebody who has not read the policy can infer a condition without intending to. Keeping the settings in the approval column is simpler and more reliable than expecting everybody to know the rules.

Those two are permanent. Everything else is an ordinary phase plan.

The operational half can move quickly, and in a practice it needs to, because the constraint changes weekly.

Budget and bids within a service line. Scheduling and pacing. Rotation among creative that has already been cleared. Reducing weight anywhere, at any time, without approval — because lowering spend is reversible and requiring permission for it guarantees it will be worked around during the week somebody is on leave.

Granting those early removes almost all the friction without touching anything clinical.

The most useful line in this version is that weight may be added only to a service with appointments available in the next four weeks, checked that week.

It converts the category's most common expensive mistake into something that cannot happen through ordinary authority. Advertising a full service produces enquiries answered late and patients offered a wait they were not expecting, and the damage outlasts the campaign.

The check is a minute in the appointment book, and the record column asks for the availability the change was based on, so a decision can be reviewed against what was actually known at the time.

The change record here carries one field a general plan does not: the availability the decision rested on.

That makes the weekly review concrete. A change that added weight to a service which then filled is not a mistake if the book showed room on the day; it is a mistake if it did not. Without the field, that distinction is a matter of recollection, and recollections in a busy practice are generous.

An automated rule may move money between services within bounds, and it should be required to read availability before it does.

Where that is not possible — and in many practices it is not, because the appointment book is not connected to anything — the rule's authority should be narrower: reductions only, or moves within a single service. A rule that can increase spend on a service without knowing whether the service can see anybody is a rule that will eventually do exactly that.

No rule should touch creative, claims or targeting, for the same reason no person does under ordinary authority.

When a practitioner joins or leaves, two columns in this plan change at once.

Capacity changes, which alters every availability condition attached to their service. And the claims change, because creative naming that person is wrong from the day they go and creative describing the service may need re-reading.

So a practitioner change is an entry in the reversal column: that service's budget authority returns to approval until the claims have been re-checked and the new availability recorded. It is a short interruption and it prevents a set of ads that are simultaneously inaccurate and well-funded.

The triggers here should be mechanical and uncontroversial: any change touching claims or targeting, a change into a service with no availability, or two unrecorded changes.

Written in week one, applied without argument. Stepping an area back to approval in a practice usually reflects a busy fortnight rather than a judgement about anybody, and a rule agreed in advance is what keeps it that way.

Where a practice advertises to referring practitioners as well as to patients, that is a separate area in this document rather than a variation of the patient rows.

The audience is small and professional, the cost per action is much higher, and the judgement is different: a referrer campaign is a professional communication and its wording carries more clinical weight, not less. Folding it into patient authority means somebody optimising on cost per enquiry will eventually reduce it to nothing, because it will always lose that comparison.

Give it its own phase, its own limits and its own evidence — usually referrals received rather than enquiries — and keep the wording in the approval column exactly as the patient rows do.

Where a practice runs several locations, the availability condition has to be read per site, and it is usually simpler to grant authority per site as well.

Capacity, catchment and practitioners all differ between sites, and a permission written for the group will be exercised against a blended view that hides the case that matters: one location full, one quiet, both funded at the same weight.

One row per area per site is more rows and it is the version that reflects how the practice actually runs.

Seven checks. One row per area, no blanket permission. Claims and targeting settings are in the approval column at every phase. Budget authority is bounded by service line and conditioned on availability checked that week. Every change record names the availability it was based on. Reductions need no approval anywhere. Automated rules cannot touch creative, claims or targeting, and cannot increase spend without reading availability. And a practitioner joining or leaving returns that service's authority to approval until the claims and the book have been re-read.