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Healthcare Consultants Offer Clients a Variety of Specialized Services

BY ANN HALPREN

When physicians, hospitals or other healthcare entities want a little advice, there are consultants available to offer objective advice and opinions. Although consultants usually are well versed in many aspects of healthcare, they often concentrate their services in an area of specialization.

CON Issues. In private practice for 25 years, Noel Falls of Fairhopebased Falls Marketing is a management consultant specializing in regulatory affairs. “In Alabama, that’s licensure and certificates of need,” he says. “It also takes me into federal regulations because some facilities and services that are governed by those.”

He has clients in seven southeastern states. “In Alabama, CON is a very stressful process for providers,” says Falls. “I do everything I can to limit the amount of worry and involvement.”

Falls works with almost every kind of provider — physician practices, hospitals, ambulatory surgery centers, nursing homes, home health agencies and hospices. “I can’t think of a single type of facility I haven’t represented including state government.” He also provides expert testimony in administrative and judicial settings.

Coding and Operations. One of the Birmingham area’s newest firms, Livingston Healthcare Consulting, benefits from its owner’s 15 years of experience. Monica Livingston is a registered health information administrator with a degree in health information management. “I’ve worked in inpatient, ambulatory care and physician practices, but my love is the outpatient arena,” she says.

Her company focuses on revenue enhancement auditing — helping clients capture revenues missed through inappropriate coding or modified usage while staying compliant.

Livingston also offers physician education on coding. “Physicians are becoming aware that coding is how they’re getting paid.” She stresses specificity rather than length in documentation. “Basically if it’s not documented, it wasn’t done. That’s the coding rule.”

Hospital Funding. From a start arranging mortgages for medical office buildings, Steve Nash worked as an investment banker and ultimately became the director of healthcare finance for Sterne Agee & Leach. He left that securities firm about a year ago to open Nash Capital Advisors. His company assists hospitals in bond debt transactions.

“I advise hospitals on the issuance of bonds,” says Nash. “I look for financial and structural pitfalls. I help them navigate the murky waters of a bond issue making sure they don’t pay too much in fees or have bad covenants or structures that might bind them later.”

Nash also assists physicians, specialty hospitals and surgery centers in acquiring capital to build, grow or sustain their operation, to buy a competitor or to sell their business.

Joint Ventures. Built on decades of healthcare experience, Cullmanbased Salient Health Ventures is just 18 months old. Partners Steve Nyquist and Jay Weatherly help negotiate joint venture relationships between physicians and hospitals. “We are committed to the local healthcare delivery system, the community hospitals and their physicians,” says Nyquist.

“There is no one route for hospitals and physicians to work together,” says Weatherly, explaining that a facilitator can guide the parties through decisions that meet legal, regulatory and practical considerations. “We help the two parties explore different ways of achieving the outcome they have established.”

Salient Health’s new Pulse MD service for hospital CEOs helps communicate physician opinions collected through personal interviews and delivered in an executive summary format.

Nonprofit Specialist. Barbara C. Traylor, CFRE, APR, counts a number of healthcare groups among her nonprofit clients. “Sometimes with nonprofits, there is a great benefit in having someone from the outside facilitate a process, analyze their development operation or make software recommendations.”

She believes in setting measurable goals and benchmarks on achieving them. “An organization needs plans developed through consensus of their leadership and board,” says Traylor. “The primary documents for an organization are its strategic plan, its budget and its development plan.” She says these must be synchronized for results that carry an organization forward.

With more than 30 years of experience in public relations and fundraising, mostly in healthcare, Traylor founded her consulting firm two years ago.

Referral Developmemt. Founded in 1993, Strategic Visions Inc. provides a broad range of services. “I specialize in employee satisfaction and patient satisfaction and physician relations with a strong emphasis on referral development,” says John O’Malley. The company also does training and strategic planning, and it facilitates the planning process. O’Malley also has extensive experience in helping healthcare concerns create and cultivate their public image in the imaging field.

“I’m a strong advocate for patient safety and satisfaction,” says O’Malley, who founded National Patient Recognition Week in May. His company seeks ways to get staff and physicians to work better together.

Writer of a regular column for the American Marketing Association’s journal, O’Malley also has written several books related to healthcare on topics ranging from patient satisfaction to one on marketing and sales.

Strategic Planning. Physicians, hospitals and other healthcare organizations call on Gadsden-based Griffin & Associates, Inc. for strategic planning, facility planning, certificates of need and the sale or lease of healthcare organizations. “I spend about 90 percent of my time with healthcare organizations,” says Gary Griffin.

“If you don’t have valid business and market reasons to do a healthcare project to begin with, the project is doomed to mediocrity or failure,” says Griffin. “You’ve got to have a good business plan and a good market.”

“I also help put together joint ventures and I will participate in some joint ventures,” Griffin states. He occasionally partners with physicians to better understand their side of the issues.

Griffin concludes, “I serve as an advisor to the board of the joint venture and continue to provide advice.”

This article taken from the November 2005 issue of the Birmingham Medical News.

© 2005 Salient Health Services, Inc. All rights reserved.