Types of Healthcare Consulting — and How They Enable Success

The healthcare industry has recently seen rapid growth and significant change.

Patient expectations continue to shift, new technologies emerge every day, and providers are adapting to the changing needs of specific populations.

Amid this ever-evolving landscape, demands on healthcare leaders are likewise increasing. Today’s leaders must juggle healthcare technologies, human resources (HR) concerns, marketing initiatives, and more — all while ensuring patients get the best care possible from fully equipped and supported providers.

But no leader can do it all. That’s why many turn to different types of healthcare consulting for the organizational support they need to create a thriving healthcare practice.

What Is Healthcare Consulting?

Healthcare consultants are advisory professionals who help facilities address common operational issues, such as patient overload, workflow kinks, technology hurdles, or billing concerns.

Consultants take a holistic look at the organization to identify root causes of inefficiencies and create custom solutions to strengthen operations and ensure long-term sustainability. Their main objective? Enabling leaders to effectively balance patient care and business operations.

Healthcare consulting is projected to grow from what was a $31 billion global industry in 2022 to nearly $63 billion by 2032, according to Precedence Research. And for good reason – healthcare consulting companies have helped healthcare leaders worldwide:

• Improve patient care through better workflows that enable providers to spend more time with patients
• Attain higher rates of staff retention and productivity through efficient technology use and sustainable workloads
• Implement effective business strategies for billing, contract negotiation, organizational growth plans, and revenue cycle optimization

The Varied Fields of Healthcare Consulting

With many types of healthcare consulting available, it’s critical to assess your organization’s particular needs to determine which healthcare consulting companies to partner with. Here are seven common specialties to consider.

Strategic Consulting

A healthcare business is just that: a business, with its own mission, vision, and goals. Strategic healthcare consultants help strengthen these elements by putting the right processes in place to enable organizational growth.

These consultants work with healthcare leaders to evaluate past business errors and build new practices for success. They develop roadmaps for executing on organizational goals, equipping leaders with the tools and resources they need to realize those objectives.

Specifically, strategic healthcare consultants focus on:

• Financial procedures and revenue cycles
• Plans for future growth and development
• Management processes and staff and patient experiences

IT Consulting

Technology is central to the modern healthcare environment — from standard technologies like electronic health records (EHRs) and telehealth (which accounted for around 30% of all care visits in the second half of 2020) to more advanced tools like predictive care data and digital therapeutics.

Healthcare IT consultants ensure facilities adopt and use technologies that streamline operations and better serve employees and patients. They enable what Deloitte calls “operational readiness,” a state in which the facility has the right policies, processes, and roles to adopt new technologies at little risk. To do so, they focus on:

• EHR optimization
• Data governance and security
• Hands-on training and demonstrations

Compliance Consulting

A single case of non-compliance costs organizations an average of around $4 million, according to GlobalScape. And in the healthcare industry, where sensitive patient data is highly protected, that number can be even higher.

Yet, one study found that 83 of the 100 healthcare facilities they studied were non-compliant with at least one regulation. Healthcare compliance consulting firms address this issue, ensuring facilities properly adhere to local, state, and federal regulations

Healthcare compliance consulting firms address:

• Patient records and confidentiality procedures
• Legal operations and medical licensing
• Risk management and patient safety
• Financial and insurance-based compliance

Population Health Management Consulting

Faced with significant disparities in healthcare access across demographics, many organizations are shifting to population health management practices to address groups’ unique needs.

Population health management consulting helps organizations analyze patient data, outcomes, and financial information among patients grouped by age, condition, income level, or other factors. Their goal? To help providers better understand population-based patterns and provide targeted care to individual patients.

Specifically, population health management consulting experts focus on:

• Balancing operational costs with targeted patient care
• Helping providers account for and treat chronic conditions earlier
• Analyzing group data to ensure patients aren’t lost in the system
• Improving quality (Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set, or HEDIS) and patient satisfaction metrics

HR and Operations Consulting

Clinical providers and staff are essential to any healthcare organization. But difficulties within the care environment caused nearly 100,000 nurses to leave the profession between 2020 and 2022 alone, according to the American Hospital Association.

These types of healthcare consulting help identify the operational areas that negatively impact staff satisfaction, muddy providers’ workflows, create burdensome workloads, and reduce retention rates.

These consultants work to improve:

• Recruiting and hiring procedures
• Retention and support strategies for providers and staff
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives

Revenue and Reimbursement Consulting

To give patients the most proactive, need-aligned care for the lowest cost, organizations worldwide are shifting to a value-based care reimbursement model in which patients pay for the quality of the care they receive, rather than services delivered.

Revenue and reimbursement consultants balance finances and patient care within this model to ensure both providers and patients exchange the best possible care at the most affordable prices.

They advise leaders on core elements of value-based care, including:

• Managing health insurance claims effectively
• Designing new revenue cycle workflows
• Addressing obstacles in current reimbursement processes

Marketing Consulting

Without strong marketing strategies, providers won’t have a steady stream of patients to care for and organizations will lose revenue.

Marketing consultants assess organizations’ current approaches and develop improved strategies to bring more patients into the ecosystem. They combine creative and strategic skills to produce marketing collateral that helps organizations remain at the forefront of their competitive peer groups.

Healthcare marketing consultants focus on:

• Connecting with consumers authentically via a variety of channels and assets
• Tailoring the organization’s specific messaging to their target audience
• Identifying revenue-boosting marketing and sales opportunities

Finding the Right Specialist for Your Needs

Determining which types of healthcare consulting best match the unique needs of a facility requires leaders to carefully assess their specific context. Are your billing cycle inefficiencies eating into your organization’s revenue? Are your staff and providers expressing concerns over burdensome workloads? Are the technologies you put in place to solve problems actually causing more?

Top services like Elxo help leaders identify their specific needs and implement custom solutions designed to solve critical problems. Combining expert advisers with intuitive technology and ongoing support, Elxo helps providers offer streamlined, optimized care and puts power back in patients’ hands through an easy-to-use app.

Ready to enhance your practice with specialized support? Learn more about how Elxo can help.