Driving Better, Faster Decisions Across Public and Private Sector Healthcare

Leading global consultancy Guidehouse recently acquired Dovel Technologies – creating a powerful, technology-driven organization characterized by deep industry experience and distinguished technical capabilities. Dovel specializes in advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence, enterprise digital modernization and system integration, and cloud adoption and infrastructure optimization.

With a goal to solve healthcare’s most complex challenges, Guidehouse’s Health segment will leverage Dovel’s capabilities to help providers, payers, and public sector health and life sciences organizations deliver informed, resilient, and innovative services to their communities and customers at an accelerated pace.

Guidehouse believes that technological innovation is improving the inefficiencies that have plagued the care continuum and scientific discovery. The firm’s experts in both public sector and regulated commercial markets work together on cloud-enabled interoperability strategies to connect and coordinate care – curating true end-to-end patient and member experiences. And with new capabilities and biocomputing resources to integrate science and technology across vaccine, immunology, and infectious disease domains, Guidehouse is also supporting life sciences companies in getting new vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics to the market faster.

Video transcript:

Jody Tropeano: Welcome to another HLTH Announcement Spotlight series. Today I'm here with Alicia Harkness, Partner and Health Segment Leader at Guidehouse. Hi Alicia, thanks for joining today.

Alicia Harkness: Hi, nice to see you.

Jody: So we have a few things we're going to get to today but first off, we saw that Guidehouse was recently ranked the third largest healthcare management consulting firm so congrats about that. Would love if you can tell us a little bit more about what you're working on in the health space.

Alicia: Absolutely. Well first of all why don't I start with a little bit about Guidehouse. We are a global consultancy with broad management technology and risk consulting capabilities. We're super proud of our health segment which integrates the consulting and the outsourcing expertise in both the public sector and regulated commercial markets to solve healthcare's most complex challenges. We have a collaborative one health industry approach to how we work with our clients. We tap into talent across not only our health segment but those resources that work with us have capabilities in financial services, state and local government, energy, sustainability and infrastructure, national security, and we find that to be really valuable in serving our clients to create informed, resilient and innovative services supporting their communities and you know customers. As for who we actually work with, we work with companies across the entire healthcare ecosystem from hospitals and health systems, payers, federal, state, local government, health agencies, life sciences companies, employers and even retail health organizations. 

Jody: And so I want to hear a little bit more about how your work across all industries impacts healthcare companies in particular and why that's important.

Alicia: Sure. Well we'll start with just talking a little bit about the simple truth of healthcare these days and the health care complexity is truly an unforgiving reality. It's also the number one reason why companies reach out to us. What makes Guidehouse truly different from our competitors is that we have a 50/50 split between the public and the private sector organizations that we serve. We've enjoyed improving the health and well-being of rural community populations by rewriting the playbook for policy health care and social services in those areas and how have we done that? We've worked really focused on analyzing social determinants of health as an example with a cross-section of capabilities. We've also been front and center with pharmaceutical companies and government agencies as they deployed and moved forward with their Covid-19 vaccine development leveraging our clinical research analytics support, commercialization, deployment strategies, and this work has actually informed some really interesting projects to even create a certified testing lab for one of the Fortune 5 employers where they're conducting now 20 million tests annually. You know we've helped the northeast health system reduce their total cost of care by close to 300 million dollars now over the past three years and helping them remain resilient throughout this pandemic and drive clinical, financial and operational success has been really important. 

Jody: And I saw that you recently announced that you have plans to acquire Dovel Technologies. Pretty big move in this increasingly digital world. So what else is Guidehouse up to, including that, in the digital and tech space?

Alicia: Dovel's capabilities is going to actually add a lot to our already great platform. They have a substantial amount of capabilities in advanced data analytics and automation. The digital modernization and system integration work they do or the cloud adoption infrastructure optimization is really going to complement our service offerings and we're thrilled to bring them on board. We're going to also expand our strong partnerships with organizations like Salesforce or AWS, Google, Microsoft, Workday, to name a few, and we're growing quite a few of our investments in enterprise information systems and the likes of grants administration and outcome measurement, bioinformatics and even next generation sequencing or genomic analysis so we're thrilled that this is not just bringing a technological innovation to our platform but it's also enabling us to improve some of the inefficiencies that have plagued the care continuum and scientific discovery so we're working with organizations on these cloud-enabled interoperability initiatives to connect and coordinate care and enable curation of the true end-to-end patient experience and Dovel and now Guidehouse I think we'll be able to bring a lot of value there.

Jody: And of all that you're working on, what would you say your biggest focus in healthcare is right now and then just any last thoughts that you want to share with us?

Alicia: We're focused on future proofing companies for this type of evolving healthcare environment, helping them master the trends in payment, operational and consumer disruption and so they can simultaneously build these healthier communities that we truly care about all while sustaining what's truly important at the same time the margins, growth and innovation so yes, it has been busy we're having a lot of fun serving our clients. We are challenging ourselves to outwit the complexity that healthcare organizations are facing and instead strengthening the fabric of the healthcare ecosystem leveraging these types of multidisciplinary teams. Lots of fun.

Jody: Yeah, well that's great to hear and wish you all the best. Thanks for joining us today, Alicia.

Alicia: No problem. Thanks for having me.