Complex Journeys Demand a Trusted Guide

Navigating the complexities of healthcare requires agile, future-focused solutions to drive high-quality, cost-effective outcomes. Guidehouse is the only consultancy purpose-built from the ground up to help organizations thrive in a complex world where the regulators and the industries they serve must work together to address evolving challenges.

Ranked the third largest healthcare management consulting firm in 2021 by Modern Healthcare, the Guidehouse Health team helps hospitals and health systems, government agencies, life sciences and retail companies, and payers solve their most complex issues, overcome unique market challenges, and deliver innovative services to their communities and customers.

With 11 KLAS #1 rankings, the Guidehouse Health team includes a diverse range of public sector and provider administrators, clinicians, scientists, and other experts with decades of strategy, funding, policy, revenue cycle, digital and retail health, managed care, and managed services experience. Visit the Guidehouse Center for Health Insights for a complete view of healthcare payment, operational, and consumer disruption insights and solutions.

Video transcript:

Jody Tropeano: I'm Jody Tropeano, HLTH's Content Director, and for today's Announcement Spotlight, I have the pleasure of speaking with Guidehouse's COO Charles Beard, who has a few exciting updates to share with us. Welcome, Charles. 

Charles Beard: Hi Jody.

Jody Tropeano: All right, so let's get right to it. To start, can you tell us a little bit about who is Guidehouse?

Charles Beard: Guidehouse was sort of created from that mold of how do we sort of help our clients and enable them to take on these great challenges, recognizing they have to solve big problems and at the same time, they've got to do that and restore confidence in society. And so that's really what we did. We built the company specifically for that. We don't necessarily separate government and commercial industry. We bring them both together sort of in a public private process and that's how we deliver service back to the market to help them solve these kinds of challenges. 

Jody Tropeano: So then how does Guidehouse impact the healthcare ecosystem?

Charles Beard: Yeah, great question, Jody. You know this is one of the great benefits for our clients because we really have an end-to-end capability to support them as they think through the various challenges. We have folks that are all the way up on the public policy public health side who really have that expertise for you know many many many years, right. We also have people that are also in life sciences and very used to bringing drugs to market all the way through the research in the human trials aspect. We have people in the payer provider space that not only understand the clinical transformation needs that need to take place but also understand the operational side of that from a technical perspective, a process perspective and a policy perspective that allow you to have those kind of results. And then of course on our back office side, we have revenue cycle management capabilities that we also help our clients. But all of this quite frankly is built around a healthcare model. In healthcare, we talk about patient-centered delivery. In this case we've been a client-centered delivery in healthcare and we bring those capabilities to bear for those clients. Wherever they happen to be, you help them solve those challenges. 

Jody Tropeano: And then what are some of the results that you've helped your clients achieve?

Charles Beard: Yeah, Jody, let me answer it in two phases. One is that in sort of the transformational consulting work in particular in the provider space. We're working with many of them that have had to make very difficult choices from a cost takeout perspective. And so we're working with them on those programs not just from a theory perspective but how do you operationalize that and bring it to fruition and at the same time work to make sure that the patient and quality safety outcomes are still assured. And so that's we're very happy with the work that we're doing in there and that work continues to expand. I would also say that we're helping them think through sort of the urban and rural divides that they may be able to accommodate as they think about the social determinants of health associated with the communities that they serve. In the case of Covid-19, we're doing a number of things. One is in the life sciences side, we're very pleased to work with a number of the pharmaceutical companies and their government regulators to help get their vaccines to market. The second is we worked with a number of providers around the country, I think at last count it was over 300 as well as 20 state and local government organizations to secure Covid funds in the United States to ensure liquidity of those health systems. And so you get a sense of what the scale of this business can provide and what that value stream looks like in terms of our ability to impact end-to-end.

Jody Tropeano: Excellent. So then why is the work that Guidehouse is doing essential in today's healthcare landscape, especially as the pandemic continues to accelerate change?

Charles Beard: Yeah, the landscape accelerating change is the understatement of the year, I think. You know when this all began, you know telehealth for example exploded right and we didn't think that would spring back to where it was. It has pulled back quite a bit and so we're having to think through those strategy and what that adoption looked like and make it as frictionless as possible and we certainly are seeing the need for it in this current wave that's currently underway. I think the other is that we're seeing real challenges from a staff delivery perspective especially in the clinical community. You know what they endured in the first wave was difficult to do, difficult to bear and certainly we all celebrated the great work that they were doing but now you know 18 months on, this has really become very very difficult to sustain and so you know the kind of staffing shortages we're seeing are not temporary. We believe that they'll be structural and so we have to work with our clients to think through what does that really mean, what does that mean in terms of the ability to deliver locally, what does that mean strategically in terms of alliances you may need to form because service lines won't be able to be provided, what does that mean in terms of of patient quality and safety outcomes as you go forward and as you balance those staffing shortages with that real world reality. So our work continues both throughout that entire value stream that we described and we don't see it slowing at all.

Jody Tropeano: Thanks for sharing. So Charles, do you have any final thoughts for us today?

Charles Beard: Well I think the final thoughts are that you know I hope what you begin to understand is how we've put together this organization very uniquely to try and bridge the gaps between the public sector and the private sector and find ways to get to the solutions that we really need and that's across the life cycle right from life sciences all the way through.

Jody Tropeano: Well thanks for joining us today and thanks for all the information you shared with our audience. We look forward to see what happens next with Guidehouse.

Charles Beard: You bet, thanks again.