What to Expect from a Healthcare Consulting Firm

For many executives, the idea of hiring an outside firm for consulting brings with it an important caveat: costs. Without some hard evidence for why healthcare consulting firms are beneficial to both operations and the bottom line, it can be difficult to get everyone on board with the idea.

The best healthcare consulting partners, however, will be worth the additional costs. A great healthcare consulting firm will be able to justify its services through offering expertise, creating efficiencies, reducing liability, generating a sustained return on investment, and building a better workplace. This final point is particularly worth noting, considering the costs of hiring new employees, as well as the continually shifting expectations about workplace benefits and culture.

Without a doubt, healthcare consulting can add value to your organization. But how should you evaluate this performance? Here’s what to expect from a healthcare consulting firm.

What to Expect from a Healthcare Consulting Firm

There are many different reasons why you might be interested in hiring a healthcare consulting firm. The motivations behind your specific organization’s need for healthcare consulting might be drastically different than those of another enterprise. At the same time, you might not fully understand what you’re looking for—or what can really be achieved—until you’ve met with a few healthcare consulting firms.

When evaluating healthcare consulting firms, you should look at a variety of both micro and macro factors. On one hand, you’ll want to find a partner organization that has niche experience and tools related to your current priorities. At the same time, going too narrow can lead to cost synergies. It’s also a lot easier to trust the reputation of a larger, well-known consulting firm.

No matter why your organization is looking to work with a healthcare consulting partner, there are certain features that can be extremely beneficial. These are a few things you should look for and expect from a healthcare consulting firm:

• Benefits consulting – Understanding and optimizing corporate benefits plans is one of the top reasons why it can make sense to work with a healthcare consulting firm. It’s difficult for enterprises to know what their employees want in terms of total benefits—particularly when it comes to healthcare. Getting this right can take a lot of backend work, which is best accomplished with the help of healthcare consultants.
• Employee listening – There are many reasons why the concerns and opinions of your workforce is an important part of the healthcare consulting process. Making changes to healthcare benefits within your organization can be a hugely contentious issue. While some people will be all for certain ideas, others will be totally against them. Without taking the time to understand employee sentiment, it’s easy to not only send the wrong message, but seriously upset people. When something as important as healthcare is on the line, you need to know how actions will affect workplace sentiment, culture, and satisfaction.
• Access to cutting-edge technology – While technology in a vacuum doesn’t guarantee better outcomes; it can vastly improve capabilities when leveraged by knowledgeable parties. This is one of the major benefits of working with a healthcare consulting firm—and should be one of your top expectations. A consulting firm should have the right tools to collect and synthesize data with ease. Utilizing analytics is absolutely essential to get as close as possible to the efficient frontier of enterprise operations. The right healthcare consulting firm will be well-equipped for this.
• Create value – Ultimately, you need a consulting firm to create value for your organization. This can be accomplished on multiple fronts. High-value care is a huge talking point today due to the continually climbing costs of healthcare. Healthcare spending comes in at an unbelievable 19.7 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. Enterprises that cut down costs to themselves and their employees, while also improving quality, will attract the best talent.
• Niche and broad expertise – It sounds demanding to expect refined and general knowledge from the same organization but this should be par for the course when it comes to healthcare consulting firms. You’ll want a partner enterprise that has the scale and resources to deal with a wide range of problems, while still being able to drill down into the details of each.

There are many specific things stakeholders should look for when evaluating healthcare consulting firms. But what else needs to be considered here? It’s also critical to think beyond the specifics and look at the greater picture.

What Can Healthcare Consulting Firms Do for Your Enterprise?

To fully know what to expect from a healthcare consulting firm, you need to have a deep understanding of your needs. While this might sound incredibly obvious, it’s not uncommon for organizations to hire consultants and simply demand they fix everything. Of course, a great consulting firm will be able to identify and rectify issues. But it’s going to take a lot longer to do so when internal parties can’t point them in the right direction.

When thinking about healthcare within an organization, there are two themes that underpin just about all decisions: strategy and transformation.

Healthcare transformation is a hugely popular term today, as many enterprises are taking a hard look at how they operate from a benefits perspective. Often, practices are outdated and based on precedents that no longer apply to many.

Healthcare transformation is all about bringing an organization’s benefits and employee wellbeing to greater heights. While some executives might see this as distracting from what they perceive as more pressing operational concerns, this isn’t a long-term approach. The top talent increasingly demands employers meet their expectations. If you’re not going to provide that, someone else will. Losing employees isn’t just a financial burden; it makes your organization weaker when great workers go somewhere else.

Transformation and strategy are two edges of the same sword. As transformation happens, your enterprise will develop and implement new strategies. The further transformation will then happen based on an analysis of the success of these programs. A healthcare consulting firm can be your guide to making this all a reality.

No matter the scope of your organization’s healthcare needs, bringing on a consulting firm can help you realize objectives more effectively and in less time. Health is too important to ignore. Finding the right healthcare consulting firm will allow you to recognize and remediate any shortcomings in your healthcare benefit plans.