The business of providing professional services and/or/ staff augmentation to Healthcare organizations has become a fast-paced field which enables healthcare institutions to quickly learn and apply their knowledge to a variety of problems. This field requires fighting challenges that are crucial for the success of healthcare providers’ clinical and commercial future, and yet are severely difficult to solve. Likewise, the pressure to consistently maintain high-quality services and performance is also affected by the occasionally shifting goals of clients. It is more than essential to conserve the quality and value because these two things haven’t changed for ages. Clients in the healthcare industry want professional and top-notch services from their trusted professional services partner.
Having over a 15-year track record of delivering success to healthcare clients, Birmingham-based Blue Eagle Consulting, Inc. (BEC) is catering to the clients’ demands for quality with its contract Health IT resources. BEC also assists clients on a variety of IT projects, providing senior-level consulting professionals with heavy operational and software expertise.
According to Mark Griffin, the Owner of BEC, the thing that has changed in healthcare consulting is how, who, or why organizations are engaging their services with their clients. Previously, his company almost entirely relied on direct business engagements. Today, many of its hospital engagements involve a handful of select, strategic partners having an international footprint and BEC supports them by providing subject matter experts (SME’s) with extensive and comprehensive type skills and experience. Over the past 3 to 4 years, BEC has efficiently gained their trust and partnered with them.
Healthcare-Focused Consulting Services at BEC
BEC is singularly focused on healthcare where its services are divided into two segments, each with well-versed consultants: those are health plans and provider healthcare organizations.
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Health Plans:
Running a health plan today means facing constant challenges—including continuous pressure from rising medical costs affecting insurance premiums, fierce competition, and never-ending reform efforts. BEC understands these challenges in the present fierce competition and strives to help clients with top-notch and integrated care while reigning in costs. Their highly trained health plan experts are prepared to seamlessly and cost-effectively administer IH (Integrated Health) efficiencies, optimization and benefits via a client’s chosen technology platform(s) (i.e. Facets, QNXT or HealthEdge).
In recent years, BEC has also launched a unique PRN contract nursing model that can immediately augment health plans Utilization Management Departments to engage highly experienced nurses for Prior Authorizations (PA’s), Grievance and Appeals (G&A), CMS Audits, etc.
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Hospitals and Large Physician Groups:
BEC provides consultants who are very accomplished in software capabilities and know how to efficiently guide the staffs of hospitals in “best practices” around Clinical Workflow, Outcome Management, Revenue Cycle Optimization, and Value Based Care. Their consultants have the previous experience of serving as nurses, claims managers, and other operations personnel. With an average of 5 to 7 years of experience in their specific field, Blue Eagle consultants know exactly how to integrate IT systems with workflow management. For over 15 years, they have been helping hospitals to integrate their IT systems and workflow to assure maximum return on the technology investments.
Furthermore, the group practice experts from BEC are assisting large medical groups with perfecting sustainable management models that affect consistent, high-quality, and cost-effective care by optimizing the use of data analytics capabilities on systems like Cerner, Epic Ambulatory, eClinicalWorks, Allscripts, athenahealth, NextGen, GE Centricity, etc.
Understanding Clients Demands with Extensive Business Expertise
Mark believes that clients want providers who can comprehend their needs and situations quickly, understand the problems to be addressed, and provide people and expertise to produce results immediately. Additionally, Mark explains that hundreds and millions of dollars are being invested by clients in very sophisticated and comprehensive technology, but in actual condition, there are many challenges with healthcare organizations gaining the desired optimization, outcomes management, and data analytics these systems are capable of. Clients want their consulting provider to focus on them; understand the technologies they are using and the problems they are facing. He further adds, “We work very hard to ensure that everybody is on the same page when it comes to expectations.” Most of the BEC customers are looking for an adept partner that can quickly and accurately identify and address critical gaps in either organizational IT expertise and/or operational bandwidth. Therefore, BEC resources with a long track record of excellence measured by results are the prime reasons behind the successful expansion of BEC.
Offering Refined Services while Tackling the Challenges
Offering Refined Services while Tackling the ChallengesBEC has overcome numerous obstacles since establishment. As the healthcare industry evolved, the requirements of clients also changed. Therefore, always looking at being “right sized” with consultants, skills and experience levels is a constant challenge. Since its establishment in 2004, the team of BEC has completed over 600 projects and/or client engagements with dozens large integrated delivery networks, health plans, physician organizations and hospital organizations in the United States and Puerto Rico. In the initial days, they have faced numerous challenges but successfully maintained trust among clients with high-quality services.
Thus, with an intense urge to support its customers while defeating the obstacles, BEC offers intuitive services like Subject Matter Expert (SME) consulting resources for individual healthcare markets, particularly health plans, hospitals, and large physician organizations.
“You always have to excel with deliverables,” says Mark
In terms of delivering services to the clients, they expect a streamlined delivery of consultants who can accurately assess problems, formulate project plans, and execute with results. Therefore, Mark recommends a continual improvement in deliverables. Likewise, he applies great emphasizes on his people’s knowledge and expertise, especially as it has been proven to producing a desirable impact and value for a client. With years of working in the consulting field, BEC continues to successfully follow its proven philosophy of never sacrificing on anything that distracts from delivering high-quality consulting value to its clients.
Further, giving his remarks on the continued success of his company, Marks gives his well-versed advice, “Keep patience, do not lose focus, do not lose track, understand the clients’ needs and requests and improve what you are doing. Sometimes you need to say no but that’s okay because in this business there’s no tolerance for failure.”
Finally, Mark elaborates the top three goals of BEC to excel in future— 1st, Maintaining integrity in services; 2nd, Delivering value to improve client relationships; and 3rd, Bringing an acute clarity in client expectations and achievable deliverables. BEC’s services need to be “top of pyramid” with regards to the consultants it provides. Clients have the right to understand how their goals or issues can be resolved.
