Consulting companies are polarized around two extremes. On one end are the tiny companies made up of a few colleagues who’ve left their corporate jobs and hung out a shingle, making everything up as they go. On the other end of the spectrum are the huge, industry-agnostic firms that send out rookies willing to work under difficult conditions for a couple of years until something better comes along, following cookie cutter methods and relying on home office backup for anything not covered in the standard boilerplate.

Healthia Consulting has broken this mold and stands out among its competitors. Exclusively focused on the healthcare industry, the company is a well-scaled, 100-consultant firm that was recently acquired by Ingenix to form its provider consulting arm. The company will retain its identity, part of which involves its focus on the work-life balance of its highly experienced consultants. You’ll see that come up quite a bit in this conversation with Co-Founder and CEO Glenn Galloway.

Tell me about Healthia.

We’re in our tenth year. We’re totally focused on healthcare and are headquartered in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul. We’re a hundred people strong, about a $20 million company in 2007. We’re very proud of our great KLAS ratings, a great independent way to measure how we’re doing.

Our services are all healthcare-focused and mainly provider-focused. We’re probably most known for working with Epic Systems’ customers, but we do a lot of management consulting and other types of implementation services. We also work a little in the payer world, but that’s primarily helping them understand what happens in the real world in a hospital.

Since I interviewed you less than a year ago in HIStalk, Healthia showed up again on the Fastest Growing Companies in Minnesota list and also received several outstanding employer awards. I guess that never gets old, does it?

It’s kind of fun and always a great honor as long as the award is team focused. It’s really about how we do as a team, the result of hard work by every one of our colleagues.

A lot of these awards take our employees’ feedback into consideration. We submit our corporate information, but we also supply the names and e-mail addresses of our staff, so they can be surveyed. We encourage them to be candid, so it’s really exciting when it comes back and their feedback is overly positive.

We always have an open dialogue of what we can do better. It was easy when we were just in the Twin Cities. It got a little harder when we expanded to Chicago and Denver. Over the last few years, we’ve really become national. But we still hold, and always will hold, quarterly meetings with all of our staff. We’ll fly them into one of those three cities and let them to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly of what’s going on. Usually there are one or two things we can fix, so when we come back the next quarter, we talk about what we did to fix them.

We’re very transparent, action-oriented and high touch. We like to see people, get their feedback and share our goals, our successes and failures and collaborate on what’s next. Once a year, we also try to meet the significant others and thank them for their contributions as well. We know consulting impacts more than the individual.

People in the consulting world are often shifted off to their client, and they never see another person from their company, so we find it very important to have these connection points and continue to build our culture.

New colleagues and candidates are surprised by our open communication and how frequently we share information. We’re open about our financials, our bill rates, our client opportunities and the next opportunities for people. We have a newsletter that goes out twice a month where we provide updates on the operations of the business – sales, marketing, the back office, etc. We also introduce new employees and recognize colleagues for recent successes.

We truly focus on obtaining and acting on employee feedback. We have a cultural advisory committee made up of line consultants for employees to share their feedback on what we’re doing or changes that they would recommend. I’ve also heard we’re different in the areas of opportunities for internal promotion and for collaboration among staff.

We also make a large investment in professional development and training. We put a strong focus on our consultants getting additional training, certification and education. That’s different from some other consulting firms.

We have a lot of people who go above and beyond, as you can imagine. We have recognition rewards for that. We do a thing called “A Night on the Town,” so if somebody’s been away from their family for a number of late nights or maybe even a weekend around go-live, we’ll give them a reward so they can go out with their family and enjoy dinner or something on us. It’s not a lot, but people seem to appreciate that.

We have a quarterly award for those who demonstrate our five core values: adaptable, collaborative, ethical, practical and results-oriented. It used to be called the Founders’ Award, but we changed the name to honor of one of our employees who was recently killed. He was a very good role model and lived each of our core values, so now it’s called the Mark Loesch Healthia Values Award. Employees are nominated by their manager or other staff, and there are usually nine or 10 individuals per quarter who get it. People consider it an honor.

Ingenix acquired Healthia in September. Tell me about what Ingenix does, how the acquisition came about, and what clients and employees will see as a result.

We were growing 30 to 40% a year. We wanted to be able to continue that growth and maybe expand a little faster and deeper in other areas to really improve the breadth of what we do. Now, there are opportunities to leverage the enhanced capabilities, scale, and resources as well as the connection points within Ingenix to service clients better than ever.

Ingenix is actually headquartered here as well, so we knew the values of the company and even knew many of the members of the leadership team. Ingenix has a great reputation for being entrepreneurial. It’s a billion-dollar company but still operates from a very small company perspective, so it seems to have that sort of culture.

What they’re known for is data and analytics capabilities. They also have a number of very highly rated, best-in-class products on the provider side. So they’re really focused on finding innovative ways to make a difference in the critical challenges facing the industry. That’s exactly the business we’re in and the things that we want to be involved with to make a contribution to as well.

Ingenix really didn’t have a provider-focused consulting business, so we filled that void. They made a couple of key acquisitions last year. There was a group on the East Coast called The Lewin Group, which has a great reputation in the public sector. We were the acquisition in the provider space.

Ingenix has a profound vision that is focused on improving the business of healthcare though information and technology. They saw that, to accomplish this vision, they needed not just an array of products to solve the challenges that the healthcare industry has, but to provide the services and the thought leadership and the knowledge to be able to do that. Andy Slavitt, CEO of Ingenix, indicated that he wanted to acquire Healthia because he was seeking the best and the brightest in the consulting business.

Andy is a great visionary and will be a mentor. He has a great speech on Healthcare 2.0 where he talks about connecting all the dots in healthcare – providers, payers, employers, pharma, the public sector, and of course, patients.

There aren’t a lot of healthcare-only consulting firms left. FCG, Superior, JJWILD, and Healthlink have all been absorbed. How will you compete with them?

If you combine us with Ingenix, we’re pretty significant in size and should be able to compete with any of those companies pretty readily. I think the differentiator is going to be that Ingenix is totally healthcare focused. It’s about making a difference just in healthcare.

I think it’s also the level of service that we provide. We have a laser point focus on making sure we meet expectations and hopefully exceed them. We make sure that all of our consultants are doing quality work, and we’re actively engaged with the client to understand their expected deliverables.

During the acquisition process, the smart people from Ingenix doing the interviews asked us to name the five or 10 things they shouldn’t even think about changing. We rattled off a bunch, but it was really around that high touch culture that we have. We’re actually seeing them adopt some of these things for the consulting group that continues to grow within Ingenix.

I think 2008 will be the year of smartly connecting with Ingenix and really raising the bar for our customers. Our clients will see greater capabilities in the depth and breadth of our services. In turn, our colleagues will, too. Other than that, they haven’t seen a lot of change. They have the same leadership team, the same cultures and values; and the same operational approach. They also have a broader package of benefits from the compensation model standpoint and new professional development opportunities.

One of the big practice areas that you mentioned was EMR implementations. Are you finding that customers want more help after the go-live to take usage to the next level and really go after ROI?

That’s what we’ve been waiting for. A lot of our business is still helping people change the paper record to an electronic record, but we’re also doing a lot of work around optimization. So, how do you do it better? How do you make it work better? How do you achieve the benefits originally targeted?

We’re starting to see some interest in, “What do you do with that darned data now?” That’s what really gets me excited, especially when you think of Ingenix and some the skills that they have in the data world. I think that’s definitely on the horizon.

I’m a recovering CIO. A lot of us here used to be buyers of consulting services, so maybe that’s why we approach this a little differently. I spent a lot of time with the children’s hospital here in Minnesota. We built a data warehouse years ago and started doing some things with the data. There’s great opportunity with that. I think the big health systems are still focused on just getting the electronic medical record in. The benefits of having that data and clinical decision support really haven’t been harvested.

Consulting companies are only as good as the consultants they can recruit and retain. What’s the secret for finding the right consultant and keeping them?

Our best source of people is our consultants who refer people they think will do a great job at Healthia. Last year, 70% of our new employees came from referrals. We pay a very nice reward for folks to do that for us. I’d much rather pay our employees than outside recruiters. We have internal recruiters that also do a great job of sorting through the referrals, and our increasingly high profile in the EMR implementation arena has led many consultants to seek us out for employment opportunities.

We really look for people’s recommendations and do good reference checking. We also use this tool called Predictive Index that measures personality characteristics. We’ve learned over the years what generally makes a good consultant. If nothing else, it makes us smart about what interview questions to ask and gives us insight into the motivation or management style that may work best for the individual.

Our interview process is very structured. We get some of the key people in the organization involved and have a standard evaluation process we use for each and every candidate. I don’t know if I want to give away all of our secrets, but one of the things we really probe is their values. We really are looking for people who are truly collaborative, adaptable, and, obviously, ethical. We want them to be able to jump into situations, be a great team player and contribute to the client’s success.

If you have a good hire that’s a good fit, then they’ll stay. That’s the retention approach as well.

Not all of your competitors emphasize the work-life balance of their consultants. Do their customers see the result of that?

What the client should really care about is they’re going have that consultant there for the term of their engagement, happy and productive. So, it’s about that balance. It’s a marathon, not a short-term race. It’s really about crossing the finish line. That’s what I care about.

We try to stick to the four-day week on site if they are travelling. We’re good about situations where people need to get home, whether it’s a family illness, a baby, or whatever it happens to be. We’re pretty good about managing expectations with the clients. I think our consultants appreciate that we try to make their lives as easy as possible if they have to be on the road.

We have an individual quarterly checkpoint with every single consultant. They develop objectives in several different areas. Much of it is obviously around the client, but it also includes other training and development or outside interests, like contributing to HIMSS and other things.

Staff managers manage that process, and I think consultants appreciate having those objectives clearly identified and getting candid feedback on how they’re doing. You don’t have to wait a year to get a performance review. I don’t even know if some of the consulting companies do performance reviews at all, other than, “You didn’t do so well.”

You mentioned earlier that Healthia turns ten this year. When you look back, what have you learned and what are you proudest of?

That’s probably long list. It always amazes me what we’ve been able to do. I’d probably have to look at the list of clients and the differences we made with those clients. I’m very proud of that.

Every one of our clients is a reference. A lot of consulting companies reserve dollars they know they’re not going to collect from clients. We’ve collected every dollar. To me, that’s a good measure of client satisfaction.

I’m also very proud of our track record for professional growth. I’ve seen a lot of people grow in 10 years. We’ve had some people that are still here that started with us. It’s just amazing to see how people have grown and that their passion for this is still burning.

I almost have to pinch myself too because it went by in a blink. When we started the business, it was just Minnesota focused, and I was just recently married. Now, we’re a national player, and I too have had a couple of kids along the way and tried to retain some of that balance.

The acquisition lets us fund the company to grow as rapidly as we want and maintain that quality. I think that should be a good message for the consultants. I think there will be lots of career opportunities. This place is just full of smart people, and I’m just amazed what they’re doing.

Acquisitions in the industry haven’t necessarily been looked at as positive. This really is. We are still an exclusively healthcare organization with even bigger goals to improve the industry.

People may not be familiar with the consulting presence that Ingenix has. They will be a thousand people strong by the end of this year. Healthia is an important part of that. Ingenix’ focus is on all of the stakeholders in the healthcare industry, and Healthia is the consulting solution for providers.

We have this little chart in the office that shows our road map for the next three years. This year is really about growth and expanding some of the service lines that we’re in. But by next year, and I don’t want to be too arrogant about it, I think we have a really good shot at being one of the top three national healthcare consulting companies.

Fast Facts

Service
Management advisory and implementation consulting services.

Company
Healthia Consulting
701 Xenia Ave. South, Suite 170
Minneapolis, MN 55416
763.923.7900
www.healthiaconsulting.com

Notable Customers
Allina Hospitals & Clinics, Children’s Memorial Hospital, North Memorial Health Care, University of Kansas Hospital.

The Bottom Line

• Two numbers tell the Healthia story: 100% client referenceability and 70% staff growth by employee referrals.
• Not only is Healthia consultant-friendly, it’s ego-neutral as well – company business cards don’t list job titles because everyone is expected to pitch in when needed.
• No only do KLAS user surveys place Healthia among the top clinical implementation vendors; staff surveys put the company among the top industry employers.

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