What makes Frontier Strategy Partners different from other healthcare consulting firms?

Frontier Strategy Partners is led by four former hospital CEOs with over 115 years of combined healthcare leadership experience. Unlike traditional consulting firms, our team has actually run hospitals — navigating the same financial pressures, workforce challenges, and board dynamics that community hospital leaders face today.

What types of hospitals does FSP work with?

FSP specializes in community hospitals, including critical access hospitals and rural health systems, primarily across the Midwest. Our experience is most directly applicable to hospitals under 200 beds where the leadership team wears many hats and resources are constrained.

What services does Frontier Strategy Partners offer?

FSP offers healthcare strategic planning, financial performance improvement, operational excellence consulting, leadership development, interim leadership, patient experience improvement, and accreditation survey readiness.

Where is Frontier Strategy Partners located and what areas do you serve?

FSP is based in the Midwest and serves community hospitals across the region — including Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, and Wyoming. We also work with hospitals nationally.

How do I start working with Frontier Strategy Partners?

The first step is a complimentary introductory conversation. Visit frontierstrategypartners.com/contact to reach out. We will listen to your situation and share relevant experience before any commitment is made.

Dan Swenson 5/12/26 Dan Swenson 5/12/26

Differentiation Isn't a Feature List: Using Playing to Win to Operationalize Porter in a Rural Hospital

There is a familiar exercise that plays out in hospital boardrooms across rural America. A consultant or a new CEO gathers the leadership team and asks what makes the hospital different. The flip chart fills up quickly: we know our patients by name, we have great nurses, we're committed to the community, we offer compassionate care, we're investing in technology, we're recruiting new specialists. Everyone nods. The list goes into the strategic plan. A year later, margins are worse, the regional system across the county line has bought another physician practice, and nobody can quite explain why the strategy isn't working.

The reason is that almost nothing on that flip chart is strategy. It is, in Michael Porter's terms, a description of operational effectiveness wearing strategy's clothes. And it is precisely the trap that independent rural hospitals fall into when they try to compete with regional systems by becoming smaller, friendlier versions of them.

This post is about how to escape that trap. It combines two of the most useful frameworks in modern strategy, Michael Porter's 1996 essay What Is Strategy? and A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin's Playing to Win (2013), and applies them to one of the hardest strategic environments in American business: the independent rural hospital. The focus throughout is on differentiation, because differentiation is where Porter is sharpest, where rural hospitals are most confused, and where the combination of these two frameworks does its best work.