HA 630 Unit 4 competitor assessment example

Second on Hours, First on Distance: A Competitor Assessment for a Community Cardiac Rehabilitation Program That Counts Home-Based Programs and Doing Nothing

Student Name

Health Care Administration, Herzing University

HA 630: Marketing and Strategic Growth in Healthcare

Instructor Name

February 5, 2026

Second on Hours, First on Distance: A Competitor Assessment for a Community Cardiac Rehabilitation Program That Counts Home-Based Programs and Doing Nothing

Who the Competitors Are

The target segments from Unit 3 are patients treated at the regional heart center and patients living 40 minutes or more from the hospital. For those patients, five alternatives compete with the program. Two are direct competitors: the regional heart center's own cardiac rehabilitation program, 70 miles from the hospital, and a six-station program at a smaller hospital in county D. Two are substitutes: a home-based virtual program offered by a vendor under contract with the largest Medicare Advantage plan in the area, and a community fitness center's supervised heart-health exercise class. The fifth, and by far the largest, is non-participation, which Unit 2 estimated at nearly four in five eligible patients.

The competitors are composite organizations modeled on a typical rural market. Each profile below was assembled the way a real one would be: from the organization's public website and program listings, its hospital price transparency file, the health plans' provider directories, and the program certification directory kept by the national cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation professional association. The date of each observation is January 2026.

Profiles

Regional heart center program. Part of a 480-bed tertiary hospital that performs bypass and valve surgery for most of the region. Twenty-four monitored stations, sessions from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, certified by the national professional association, and in network with every plan in the area. It launched a hybrid option in 2024 that combines center sessions with remote monitored sessions at home. Its strengths are capacity, hours, certification and the fact that its surgeons refer to it by default. Its weakness for our target patients is distance: a 70-mile drive three times a week.

County D hospital program. Six monitored stations, sessions Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings only, not certified, and out of network for one of the two largest Medicare Advantage plans. It is 15 to 20 minutes from most of county D and 30 minutes from county E. It enrolled, by its own report to its board, about 45 patients last year.

Plan-contracted virtual program. A national vendor delivering home-based rehabilitation through a smartphone app, a wearable heart rate monitor and weekly video visits with an exercise physiologist, offered at no copay to members of the plan that covers about 30% of local Medicare Advantage members. It removes travel entirely but does not offer in-person monitored exercise, and it is available only to that plan's members.

Community fitness center class. A twice-weekly supervised exercise class for people with heart disease, $35 a month, staffed by an exercise instructor, without heart rhythm monitoring or clinical staff. It is not a covered cardiac rehabilitation program but is a common choice for patients who skip formal rehabilitation or finish it.

Non-participation. For a patient recovering at home, not attending is free, requires no driving, and carries no immediate consequence. It is the default for most eligible patients.

Comparison on the Criteria That Decide

Patients and referring physicians choose on a short list of practical criteria: drive time, how soon the first session can start, session hours, whether the patient's plan is accepted and what it costs, and whether the physician trusts the program. The table compares all six options on those criteria, with the source for each.

Where the Program Stands

Honestly stated, the program is second to the regional center on hours, time to first session and certification, and second to the virtual program on convenience for the members who have access to it. It is first on drive time for counties A, B and C, and it is the only clinically staffed, monitored program within 30 minutes of those counties that accepts every local plan. For county D and E residents, the county D hospital is closer, but its limited hours and network gap leave room for the program's hybrid option, proposed later in the term.

The virtual program deserves particular attention. Professional societies consider home-based rehabilitation a reasonable option for selected low- and moderate-risk patients (Thomas et al., 2019), and researchers have called for wider use of virtual and hybrid delivery to close participation gaps (Beatty et al., 2023). It is a real substitute, and for some patients a better one. The program should not compete with it for those patients; it should offer its own hybrid option to patients in plans that do not cover the vendor, and refer to the vendor when that serves the patient.

The Advantage a Rival Cannot Quickly Buy

The regional center could extend its hours further or open a satellite, but opening a monitored program requires space, clinical staff, physician supervision and months of start-up. The program's lasting advantage is its location close to most of the area's eligible patients, combined with its relationship with the hospital's own cardiologists, who see these patients for follow-up for years. No competitor can copy that quickly. The program's weaknesses, by contrast, can be fixed: the 19-day wait, the narrow hours and the missing certification are all within its control, and the next unit sets targets for each.

Likely Competitive Responses

If the program begins asking regional center surgeons to refer their local patients here, the regional center may respond by promoting its hybrid option to those same patients. That response is acceptable if patients end up in rehabilitation somewhere. The county D hospital may see the program's hybrid option as a threat to its volume; a conversation with its leadership about referral agreements for county D residents, based on which program is closer and in network for each patient, would serve patients better than a contest. Because non-participation is the true competitor, the program gains more by enlarging the share of patients who attend anywhere than by taking patients from other programs (Ritchey et al., 2020).

References

Beatty, A. L., Beckie, T. M., Dodson, J., Goldstein, C. M., Hughes, J. W., Kraus, W. E., Martin, S. S., Olson, T. P., Pack, Q. R., Stolp, H., Thomas, R. J., Wu, W.-C., & Franklin, B. A. (2023). A new era in cardiac rehabilitation delivery: Research gaps, questions, strategies, and priorities. Circulation, 147(3), 254-266. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061046

Ritchey, M. D., Maresh, S., McNeely, J., Shaffer, T., Jackson, S. L., Keteyian, S. J., Brawner, C. A., Whooley, M. A., Chang, T., Stolp, H., Schieb, L., & Wright, J. (2020). Tracking cardiac rehabilitation participation and completion among Medicare beneficiaries to inform the efforts of a national initiative. Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, 13(1), Article e005902. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.119.005902

Thomas, R. J., Beatty, A. L., Beckie, T. M., Brewer, L. C., Brown, T. M., Forman, D. E., Franklin, B. A., Keteyian, S. J., Kitzman, D. W., Regensteiner, J. G., Sanderson, B. K., & Whooley, M. A. (2019). Home-based cardiac rehabilitation: A scientific statement from the American Association of Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Rehabilitation, the American Heart Association, and the American College of Cardiology. Circulation, 140(1), e69-e89. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000663