My father used to say "Nonprofit doesn't mean that nobody can make a profit". Seems applicable here.
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
#32I have never seen them consultants that provide a value commensurate with the prices they charge. They seem more like a proxy for fraud. When I worked at PayPal, there was a director who had an army of Deloitte consultants who just so happened to be from her husband's team at Deloitte. It was a clear conflict of interest and even though execs were aware, nothing was ever done. I imagine that's going on all over the place.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#33My father used to say "Nonprofit doesn't mean that nobody can make a profit". Seems applicable here.
Mine had a slight variation, "Nonprofit doesn't mean that nobody can make money".
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#34I have never seen them consultants that provide a value commensurate with the prices they charge. They seem more like a proxy for fraud. When I worked at PayPal, there was a director who had an army of Deloitte consultants who just so happened to be from her husband's team at Deloitte. It was a clear conflict of interest and even though execs were aware, nothing was ever done. I imagine that's going on all over the p…
Yep, "follow the money" often explains a lot of things that appear to be bizarre or irrational at first glance.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#35Don'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.
Maybe they could run a fundraiser in Laurelhurst for some of that money. Anything to keep the residents distracted from spending money on business FlightAware subscriptions and fighting the DOH to try to get medical records to "show" that the three airlift helicopters a week that land at SCH are in violation of their community council noise ordinance because they weren't truly "life threatening emergencies" and thus should have landed at UW or Harborview and been ground ferried from there to Children's.
Apparently the only helicopter noise some residents like is the sound of their own, ferrying them to BFI so they can go to Aspen for the weekend.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#36"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…
Consultant... Hmm Reminds me of Barney's P.L.E.A.S.E.[1] acronym for Provide Legal Exculpation And Sign Everything.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#37"nonprofit hospitals", let it sink in.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#38Realistically, non-profit hospitals aren't non-profit because they are altruistic in some sense. It's because that is a tax-efficient structure for them. Given that, the participants in the structure must have a mechanism to extract money from the machine. It's a bit of a cynical view, but I believe many non-profits are organized in this fashion and their vendor contracts are the mechanism of value extraction.
Besides the big tax advantages for the business, there are programs like the 340B Drug Pricing Program - that allow non-profit hospitals to acquire drugs at much lower cost which they can then sell to patients at normal cost. Tools like this make it useful for non-profit hospitals to acquire for-profit hospitals and effectively instantly tune up their margins, which they in fact do.
That makes this just a business operating using a tax-advantaged method, somewhat like Ikea. I think the confusion occurs when people assume 'non-profit' is a public charity that gives away money. In practice, it's just a business structure with certain advantages and constraints.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#39"nonprofit hospitals", let it sink in.
I take here "nonprofit" means same as it does with religions.
Re: Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect
#40Not to be glib, but is there any industry where management consultants have been shown to make a statistically significant difference either way?
TIL gnome-lib has a meaning outside of programming