Some of the most successful and valued consulting firms got their start by providing services for a specific software or technical niche. That’s the case with Renaissance Resource Associates of University Place, WA, initially founded to deliver deep expertise to customers of the GE Centricity Enterprise (formerly Phamis Lastword/IDX CareCast) product line. While RRA has since expanded its consulting business to include products from Epic Systems and Picis, it continues to be the recognized expert in technical and application services for Centricity Enterprise customers. The company also offers meaningful consulting careers to experienced experts who value the opportunity to use their knowledge and professionalism in a satisfying entrepreneurial environment. We spoke with Cheryl Iseberg, chief operating officer of RRA.

Tell me about RRA and how you became involved with the company.

RRA was incorporated in 2005. The owners have worked in the healthcare IT consulting industry for the last 12 years. Both Laura Noble and I worked for Phamis, the Seattle company that developed electronic medical records products and provided services for provider organizations.

After leaving Phamis, we established a consulting organization whose primary mission was to deliver implementation, technical, and support services to clients. The primary skill set that we and our employees had was experience with Phamis LastWord, also known as the IDX CareCast product.

How are your consultants helping hospitals extend the life of the former IDX product, now GE Centricity?

Some of the product areas are dated, such as the patient accounting system, but that has been to our advantage. We have some of the last remaining individuals with that type of expertise. Our employees and consultants have, on average, 15 years of experience with the GE Centricity lines, including the LastWord, CareCast, and GE Centricity product. We can help our clients extend the life of the product and work with them to optimize the system so it’s working at its highest functionality.

Other product areas are still being developed further. Our many years of experience with the core products, which is patient access, clinician order entry, and documentation, along with patient accounting, allow us to talk with the clients interested in keeping their system in place rather than moving to a new vendor. We can help them get to a place where their system is functioning at the ultimate level.

I think that’s a key differentiator for the type of services we provide that other consulting companies do not. We have more than a hundred years of experience with the product. That gives us that extra opportunity to serve our clients.

Where do your new consultants come from?

We’ve had a positive reputation with regard to employee satisfaction since we’ve been in the business. Most of our consultants are folks that we worked with previously, who may have worked with us perhaps at Phamis, IDX, or at GE, or at a client site.

Most of our employees are people with whom we have had wonderful, long-term personal and professional relationships. That really helps build our expertise since they know us and we know their level of experience and their interest level in working on one project versus another. Additionally, our clients have known our consultants for a long time and often call and ask for a particular person by name to work on their projects. It really is a nice match.

We are a company that focuses on people who have not just a GE background, but other vendor experience as well. We are pleased with our talented consultants — people who have worked in the industry for a long time and across many vendor applications. The talent of our people is what allows us to provide clients the best consultants out there.

How do you think GE’s recent layoffs will affect your business?

It’s hard to predict what may happen as a result of GE’s potentially laying off folks. Ultimately, I don’t think it changes much for us. It could bring us additional business, but that’s not something we’ve focused on from a business planning perspective.

Our focus is really trying to get the client to see where their gaps are — where they are having issues and trying to help them bridge that gap. If GE ends up laying off a large number of folks, it will be a little bit further down the road before we can see what that would look like and how that would impact the clients directly. We may have an increased ability to help clients if the layoffs include GE implementation or development people.

What HIT vendors do you think are particularly hot right now?

Certainly Epic is hot, which is why we’ve developed an Epic service line to meet the industry’s direction. We’ve been working on that for quite some time.

We’re also finalizing some of the business details around our Picis business line service. We believe that those two service lines compliment the skills and experience of consultants we have and also address some of the hot products out there. We have a lot of GE clients who use Picis, so it feels like a natural fit having this complimentary service.

We chose Epic because it seems to be one of the fastest growing healthcare IT companies right now. We want to be involved in Epic because we believe that our experience and our people are going to be able to blend nicely with that product. Since we have such a long history with IT healthcare companies, we think that our company will be an eventual leader in that service line.

With the HIT or HIS vendors, clearly Epic is out there, but we’re seeing a lot of other product companies. We do not hear of a lot of clients choosing McKesson or Cerner any more, but we are hearing Allscripts come up every now and then.

Given economic conditions, are hospitals finding it more efficient to use consulting firms instead of hiring staff?  

   

We haven’t seen a lot of changes with regard to hospitals requiring consultants to fill staff augmentation roles or whether their preference is to hire full-time employees. I think sometime this quarter we’ll start to see what kind of hiring or staffing trends will be happening.

Our biggest area of impact right now is the client’s list of projects that were once slated for 2009 that seem to have been reduced dramatically. This can be anything from a hospital construction project to an IT project. That does seem to be impacting the clients that we’re working with directly, so they may have fewer dollars for their IT projects.

Certainly they are more closely watching their travel expenses, which may impact our ability to be on site versus working remotely. Clients are asking us to be a little more creative with our travel, or to do more remote work than usual, to allow them to utilize their consulting dollars efficiently. But I think that it will be a few more months before we actually see some trend that indicates whether they are going to start to utilize consultants to provide temporary assistance versus hiring longer term employees.

Now that the economic stimulus package has been approved, what kind of manpower do you anticipate hospitals will require for advancing IT projects and where will that manpower come from?

We are all anticipating that the current administration is going to make additional dollars available to hospitals for EMR projects. If they are engaging in those projects, they are certainly going to need additional resources in order to move forward and meet any funding deadlines. What additional resources are needed really depends on the organization and where they are in terms of IT staffing.

Some may have a strong, well-staffed, and experienced IT department with the flexibility to engage their current staff in these potential new projects. Others may require the assistance of firms like RRA.

If some of these organizations do get the government funding, that will allow us to hire more people in 2009 than we might have projected. It’s dependent on when funding actually gets back to the hospitals as working capital and how quickly they establish project timelines for everything they want to accomplish. We may not see anything from that until 2010, but we anticipate being able to hire additional staff to react to what our clients will need to meet those requirements.

We’ve read about the economic stimulus options as much as anybody else in healthcare. We’ve discussed the type of projects that hospitals need financial assistance for to meet the requirements of an electronic medical record. We believe one of the primary areas hospitals need to address is the additional training required for their physicians and nurses to become computer literate. That’s probably going to be a key area where consulting firms, and in particular RRA, are going to be helpful to the physicians and nurses of our clients.

What type of individual is attracted to a consulting career, both in general and more specifically with RRA?

I feel people are attracted to RRA because of our reputation in the industry, as far as being a leader as a consulting company for GE services, and hopefully for other service lines in the future.

People know we respect our employees and that, as a small company, we have a tremendous benefit package that is equal to or better than some of the larger organizations. Today more than ever, people really need to have good benefits. Sometimes smaller companies can’t offer that. We spend a great deal of time and money and effort establishing a great benefit package to entice the best resources available.

We also think that our organization is set up to allow folks to be independent and demonstrate their industry and product knowledge, expertise, and professionalism. We let folks do their work. I think people know that we’re a good company for allowing employees to grow. They like the fact that we’re a smaller company, with few mandatory obligations and little overhead.

We attract consultants who want to focus more of their time with an individual client and not on excessive internal paperwork, company meetings, and corporate structure. Some of these folks might have come from an implementation background, where they spent their time across five, six, or even 10 clients. Consulting gives them the opportunity to spend their time with just one client and really focus on their needs. I think that’s what attracting them into consulting.

I noticed that RRA encourages employees to volunteer with local charities. How does this tie into your overall company culture?

That is an important piece of who we are. Our benefits, our core values, include encouraging folks to give back to their communities. We have a charity match program to encourage employees to donate to their favorite charities.

It links back to our core values. RRA is not just a company that we work for. We ask, “How can we give back, it may be through volunteering or providing funds, or raising money for some of these organizations?” This is an important part of who RRA is. It also allows our employees time to do other important things besides just coming to work and doing their job.

Our company culture really does provide our consultants opportunities to give back to their own communities while having a little time off and a lot of fun and personal satisfaction.

What is RRA’s growth strategy?

Over the last two years, we have maintained a strategy of trying to grow at a reasonable rate. We’re taking the perspective that we want our business to grow, certainly, but probably a little bit slower than some other companies.

We take the time to make sure that our employees are vetted appropriately so that our retention rate is high. Also, we want to work with our clients to make sure we are providing the best resources for their specific projects. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer to find those people and to find those right projects. So right now, our strategy is to grow between 20 and 25% per year over the next two to three years.

That may change if we see different economic drivers, whether it is what’s happening with the new administration’s stimulus plan for funding healthcare projects or, perhaps, changes in the priorities healthcare organizations have for their current IT projects. If things start to kick off differently in 2010, we may increase that growth rate, but right now, we’re going to stay where we’ve projected over the last three years.

What differentiates RRA from its competitors?

I think the thing that comes to mind first concerns our employees. Doing the right thing for and by our employees is number one in our mind.

The number of years we have in the industry is really unique with firms of our size. Also, while we have staff with tremendous GE experience, we also have people experienced in both GE and Picis or Epic and GE. We have people experienced with Allscripts and Eclipsys. We know that our folks have been invested in providing solutions for healthcare IT for a long time. It really gives us the ability to provide our clients the best consulting resource available.

I think some of the offerings that we have are unique, specifically in the GE Centricity area. We provide several technical services that our competition isn’t providing at this time; technical services, whether it’s system management or tailoring migration or just having a technical team with a solid understanding of the database and system architecture.

The complexities of the GE product really do require some technical expertise, whether it’s in the form of some additional programming or Tandem assistance. It’s complex to move the code. We really specialize in that area.

We also specialize in upgrade services and that’s one of the client focus areas with GE’s product. It’s complex, but we have been able to develop tools to assist our clients. We really think that our tools are premier and something that our competition just isn’t able to offer. That’s what we call filling in the gaps in the services RRA provides.

Fast Facts

Services
Lastword and CareCast application, technical and project management consulting; broad services for customers of Epic Systems, Picis, and Eclipsys; nursing informatics consulting.

Company
Renaissance Resource Associates
P.O. Box 64935
University Place, WA 98484
877.782.6357
www.rraconsulting.com

Notable Customers
Lehigh Valley Hospital and Health Network, Community Health Network, Park Nicollet Medical Center, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Montefiore Medical Center, Stanford Hospital and Clinics, Nebraska Medical Center.

The Bottom Line

*   RRA is a focused consulting organization using deeply experienced consultants to provide the best consulting resources available.
*   RRA screens new consultants for exceptional experience and capabilities, intentionally limiting company growth to avoid lowering recruiting standards.
*   The company has unique experience in preserving the value of GE Centricity Enterprise for customers and optimizing its use to achieve enterprise goals.

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