False. Consultants made billions of dollars. This is a massive win for the consulting industry.
Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
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Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#22They're just part of the machinery for extracting money from these "nonprofits". Take a closer look at anything these paragons of virtue spend money on, and you'll find rot in every last minute detail of their day-to-day operations.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#23Most of the hospital consultancy firms tied to nonprofit hospital management/board for 500 Alex.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#24"Hospitals navigating challenging financial and regulatory landscapes may call on these specialists for advice on strategic planning, cost-cutting, reorganizations, or revenue-boosting initiatives." I think it's been stated in this thread, and I learned it reading the comments on HN, but consultants are not hired to optimize processes but instead to provide decision insurance. If you take a big risk by yourself and i…
Which immediately begs the question, how do you become one of these faceless people waving vaguely in the air saying "fire a whole lot of people, that should mean you spend less right?" I submit my thesis. The PE/consultant class. A crust of slime buoyed about on the waves of capital to provide cover for the horrors underneath.
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Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#25They're just part of the machinery for extracting money from these "nonprofits". Take a closer look at anything these paragons of virtue spend money on, and you'll find rot in every last minute detail of their day-to-day operations.
Like many VC’s that extract wealth from companies to enrich themselves.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#26"Hospitals navigating challenging financial and regulatory landscapes may call on these specialists for advice on strategic planning, cost-cutting, reorganizations, or revenue-boosting initiatives." I think it's been stated in this thread, and I learned it reading the comments on HN, but consultants are not hired to optimize processes but instead to provide decision insurance. If you take a big risk by yourself and i…
Which immediately begs the question, how do you become one of these faceless people waving vaguely in the air saying "fire a whole lot of people, that should mean you spend less right?" I submit my thesis. The PE/consultant class. A crust of slime buoyed about on the waves of capital to provide cover for the horrors underneath.
I think you can only get in this position if you're already playing golf with enough CEOs. Over golf the CEO casually mentions he wants to fire 30% of the workforce but he doesn't want the flak. Then you suggest you could write a consulting report on it.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#27Don't care. I'm going to name and shame. I worked at Seattle Children's Hospital in tech for a short time. The insane amount of self congratulatory back patting to mask incompetence and tolerance of mediocrity wasted billions that could have gone to patient care. What I witnessed there was damn near criminal.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#28Not to be glib, but is there any industry where management consultants have been shown to make a statistically significant difference either way?
My dad ran a crisis management consultancy for years. I just googled a few of his clients and they all survived the process. He would come in, assist with minor layoffs, repair business processes, usually get some software installed/updated back when that was a huge multiplier to a business and then leave when everything was running smooth.
I also am aware of a situation where a pair of business consultants who were meant to be assisting with a software project were diverted (at full rate 1200/day) to assisting with redecorating an office.
I was directly involved, oppositionally, to a pair of business analyst consultants who tried to get a customer of mine to change their (admittedly terrible) vendor selection by repeating security concerns over and over again in the meeting. They never actually got to the point of analysing said terrible vendors terrible integration practices or costing up a migration path. They just banged on about security and contacted us separately after the meeting asking for more details about the security situation.
Basically you get out of it, what you want to get out of it. It depends on the consultant, their education, and the terms of their engagement. I don't know if statistics would be useful in this scenario or how you would control for wildly different outcomes.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#29I did a brief review of the publication. I do think its hard to isolate consulting engagement with broad measures on financial performance, and claims based patient outcomes.
With that being said, consultants have no skin in the game, and thier incentives are aligned more towards executive relationship management and seeking out new opportunities for revenue vs. achieving aspirational metrics that ultimately matter to a health system.
I work in medtech and a model that I am more hopeful for is attaching consulting servics with capital purchaes. (e.g. siemans, GE). This model puts skin in the game from the manufacturer as outcomes and ultimately future revenue is tied to being able to show improvement on key clinical, financial, and operational metrics.
Curious to see if this study design can be applied under this scenario (search for press releases regarding signed partnerhsips with medtech and examine a narrower set of outcomes identified in those press releases).
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#30"Hospitals navigating challenging financial and regulatory landscapes may call on these specialists for advice on strategic planning, cost-cutting, reorganizations, or revenue-boosting initiatives." I think it's been stated in this thread, and I learned it reading the comments on HN, but consultants are not hired to optimize processes but instead to provide decision insurance. If you take a big risk by yourself and i…
That’s really only a rather small part of the picture.
Hospitals are opex constrained for things that don’t generate revenue. The operations run lean and are focused on operating. There’s no bench in finance or IT or whatever to figure stuff out. Enter the consultant.
Consulting is often tied to capital spend and most importantly they go away when the job is done.