Do Tank partnered with the Vermont Program for Quality in Health Care (VPQHC) to design a five-year strategic plan that clarifies the organization’s role as a trusted leader in healthcare quality across the state.

Through a human-centered, collaborative process, the engagement aligned board, leadership, and stakeholders around a focused set of priorities — strengthening VPQHC’s ability to expand its impact, support the healthcare workforce, and advance data-driven quality improvement across Vermont.

VPQHC plays a unique role in Vermont’s healthcare ecosystem — serving as a neutral convener, quality improvement partner, and trusted resource across providers, policymakers, and community organizations.

As the healthcare environment continues to evolve, leadership recognized the need to sharpen the organization’s strategic direction. This was not about correcting performance, but about making deliberate choices: where to focus, how to expand impact, and how to sustain relevance in a system with growing demands and limited capacity.

The challenge was to translate a strong mission and broad set of capabilities into a clear, actionable strategy — one that reflects the realities of Vermont’s healthcare landscape while positioning VPQHC for long-term impact.

Do Tank’s Role:

• Designed and facilitated a human-centered strategic planning process across board and leadership
• Guided early-stage discovery to surface priorities, challenges, and opportunities
• Structured working sessions to translate input into strategic direction and actionable goals
• Supported synthesis of stakeholder feedback into a cohesive, implementable plan
• Helped define measurable strategies aligned with organizational capabilities and system needs

Do Tank approached the work as both a strategy and alignment effort — ensuring the plan reflected not only what VPQHC should prioritize, but how the organization would move forward in practice.

The process began with a board-level workshop to explore key challenges and opportunities shaping the organization’s future. This early engagement helped ground the work in leadership perspective while surfacing important questions about role, value, and impact.

From there, a series of structured working sessions with the leadership team translated these insights into a first draft of the strategic plan. These sessions were supported by iterative design work and ongoing collaboration, allowing ideas to be tested, refined, and aligned over time.

The plan was then shared with trusted partners for feedback, ensuring it reflected not only internal priorities but also the needs and expectations of the broader healthcare community. This iterative process reinforced alignment while strengthening the clarity and credibility of the final strategy.

Throughout, the work remained grounded in human-centered design principles — connecting strategic direction to the lived experiences of patients, providers, and system partners.

The resulting strategic plan provides a clear and actionable roadmap for VPQHC’s next phase of work. It defines three core goals — expanding impact, demonstrating leadership, and cultivating a culture of excellence — supported by measurable strategies across communication, workforce development, partnerships, and quality improvement.

The plan strengthens VPQHC’s ability to:

• Expand its reach and visibility through more intentional communication and engagement
• Support a more capable and connected quality improvement workforce
• Align partnerships and funding strategies to sustain long-term impact
• Design and scale initiatives that address critical healthcare quality challenges across the state

Importantly, the process also built internal alignment and capability. Leadership now has a shared framework for decision-making, clearer priorities, and a structured approach to evaluating progress and adapting over time. What emerged was not just a strategic plan, but a stronger organizational foundation for sustained impact.

For organizations like VPQHC, strategy is less about defining new directions and more about making clear choices within a complex system. This work reinforces that effective strategic planning requires both discipline and engagement — creating space for reflection, testing assumptions, and aligning stakeholders around what matters most.

When strategy is developed in this way, it becomes more than a roadmap. It becomes a shared understanding of how the organization creates value — and a practical guide for how that work moves forward over time.