Read Part 1 of Exploring Healthcare.
As the Healthcare Practice Leader, what’s your long-term vision for the practice?
Having managed a significant portion of USCCG’s business successfully for over 38 years, I've always won out by putting our clients’ interests first. Now that sounds like the grandest of clichés, but for USCCG at least, it’s overwhelmingly true. It’s one of the most pleasing aspects of our mission, this wonderful convergence of self-interests. We win only when our clients win.
Our team mantra is “Raising Healthcare Performance through Operational Excellence”. Whether in a neo-natal intensive care unit, food services, the surgical suite, or coding and billing, outstanding operational performance in terms of speed, quality, reliability, and cost performance translate into patients, physicians, nurses, and support personnel that want to be a part of the organization, and want to be treated in the hospital when their conditions require.
What are some immediate changes we can expect?
One of the areas we will focus on over the short-term is getting our message out to a broader cross-section of the healthcare space. We have been very successful in working within the network of healthcare organizations where we have relationships, but people do business with people they know and trust, and we need to become more widely known. We plan to accomplish this through webinars on topics of value to our potential clients, as well as a broader exposure at conferences and seminars, and publishing white papers on recent success stories.
What makes USCCG’s Healthcare Practice different from other consulting firms’ healthcare offerings?
The short answer is our breadth and depth of experience across many types of enterprise; we are not insular to the healthcare arena. Frankly, I believe our size is an advantage; we are large enough to bring great teams to bear, but not so big that our clients are just one more face in the crowd. They are truly vital to us. I believe that feeling will be reflected in any conversations our prospective clients have with those we have already engaged with.
Another area in which I believe we excel is our ability to orchestrate organizational change, and where appropriate, apply our LINCS technology to assure that change sticks. I don’t believe I can over-emphasize the value of having been “down the path” numerous times when it comes to creating the changes that result in greatly improved operational and financial performance.
Those who have been around the block know that in today’s information age, the “solutions” are ubiquitous. If you want to improve quality for example, there is an overwhelming storehouse of information that was previously not so available. It can literally become overwhelming if you are not experienced in converting potential to kinetic. Particularly in significant organizational change initiatives, do-overs are mighty costly, if not darn near impossible.
How many other team members are part of the Healthcare Practice? And what kind of experience do they have?
There are currently 17 full-time USCCG resources that contribute to our healthcare practice. In fact six of these team members have been with us for over 20 years and three more have been with us for over 15 years. Although our project teams overwhelmingly consist of full-time personnel, we also have a “bench” of well vetted specialists that we call upon as appropriate to the task at hand. Our USCCG healthcare team members also have a wide variety of experience outside the health arena including, Pharmaceuticals and Life Sciences, Electronics, Food & Protein, Airlines, and Supplier Relationship Management.