An Exclusive Interview with Glenn Galloway, Healthia Consulting Co-Founder and CEO

I wasn't really familiar with Healthia Consulting until I saw a recent announcement that the company had won a work-life balance award. Hmm, I thought ... that's a business that often burns people out with heavy travel and billing demands. What are they doing differently, especially since they're a healthcare-only firm and handling some pretty big clients?

I've known few happy consultants, so Healthia's ability to motivate its talent, grow rapidly, and stay close to its roots and values was appealing, kind of a pre-IBM HealthLink, pre-ACS Superior Consultant, or pre-problems FCG. My experience is limited, but healthcare-only companies always seem to do a better job than the big boys willing to dabble in everything.

I'm always brash enough to e-mail an interview request and was happy when co-founder and CEO Glenn Galloway agreed. Thanks to Glenn for spending some time with me.


Tell me about the company and yourself.

We started the company nine years ago in Minnesota and focused our services there, at least initially. In 2003, we opened offices in Denver in Chicago and will open another one later this year.

We work exclusively within the healthcare industry, but our early beginnings did include a few small projects in other industries, typically for past colleagues in need of consulting assistance. Our vision is to improve the quality and effectiveness of healthcare delivery.

As for myself, I’ve done IT consulting and have been a CIO in prior lives. I’ve been working in healthcare for almost 30 years. My first professional job was with Cargill, a grain trading company that’s #5 on the Fortune 500, but I quickly realized I enjoyed healthcare. I worked for Deloitte and Touche, primarily in healthcare, and a large PBM called ValueRX, which was acquired by Express Scripts in 1998.

I was out of a job after the acquisition and that gave me the opportunity to start what was StoneBridge Group at the time. We re-branded with the name Healthia Consulting a year and half ago when we began our expansion beyond the three regional offices. We wanted to reinforce our commitment to the healthcare industry and the timing in the market was right. The industry had just seen several acquisitions of healthcare-only consulting firms that created a niche for a national player with that exclusive focus that we have. Plus, if you Google StoneBridge you get about a million hits (laughs.) One of our guys wore a StoneBridge tee shirt on vacation and went to a golf course whose logo was very close to ours.

Our first clients were from the healthcare market. Because of our past experience, our network was great there. Jim Zerwas and I co-founded the firm. If you go to our website, you’ll see some really bad pictures of us (laughs.) Jim and I were former CIOs who were tired of buying consulting services from firms that didn’t deliver results. You had to work hard to manage the consultants and the quality wasn’t always there. From Healthia’s beginning, we focused on high quality consultants and services and built a culture around that.

In terms of clients, we have worked with some big IDNs like Allina and Fairview and academic medical centers like the University of Kansas Medical Center and Rush University Medical Center. Some of my personal favorites are small community hospitals and pediatric hospitals. I spent seven years as a CIO at a pediatric hospital and we have four or five active pediatric hospital clients.

I’m a delivery guy. I’m a frontline consultant and CIO, and I’m still billable, at least a portion of the time. We have a few sales support and recruiting folks, but for the most part, we have a very hands-on culture. My title is CEO, but I go by co-founder. In fact, you won’t find titles on our business cards because we’re a pretty flat organization and believe everyone has to pitch in.

Our mission statement was built around partnering with clients and building a work environment that offers professional growth for our colleagues. Consulting is a hard profession, so there’s only so much you can do. You want to offer something that’s challenging and rewarding.

We give quite a bit back to the community, about 5% of our income, always in healthcare, much of that to our clients’ foundations and of course, we have a special place in our hearts for those involving children. We’re active in HIMSS through our corporate membership and volunteer efforts. I think vendors need to support HIMSS ethically, and we do that. Our folks are on HIMSS boards and rolling up their sleeves and getting work done.

In terms of services, we do full management advisory right down to solution delivery. Plus, we have real heads-down implementation folks.

Healthia is lot smaller than many competitors, especially those that don’t work exclusively in healthcare. What’s the elevator speech on why you’re better?

My wife’s in marketing and she always drills me about the elevator speech, so I always ask her how long the ride is (laughs.) Our competitors are the big national consulting companies. Our guiding principal is to be the best, not the biggest. We won’t do all things. Those we do, we want to excel at. We operate with an exclusive healthcare focus and hire top performers in the industry.

It really boils down to focus. We focus on reputation, both internally and externally. We have happy consultants who are motivated and we have happy customers as well.

The company is growing quickly. What’s driving that?

We grow 30 to 35% a year. Last year, it was a little bit more. I don’t think we can grow any more than that and still be the best. Our goal is to maintain that growth rate while maintaining our reputation for exceptional delivery, so we’re managing to that.

What’s driving that is the provider world, with the recent focus on EMR implementations. That’s been the biggest thing for us and a lot of fun.

We’re privately held. We’re very modest. I’m looking at the odometer of my car, and it says 109,000 miles. We invest a lot in the company, including training and growth for our consultants. We spent over a million dollars last year on training and we’re only a $15 million company. That might explain why I’m driving a car with 109,000 miles on it.

Healthia recently won an outstanding employer award. That’s unusual for a consulting company. What are you doing right and what are other consulting companies doing wrong in getting and keeping good talent?

We spend a lot of money on training because we want to keep and continue to grow our talent. We spend a lot of time trying to find the best people and the best fit. We have a value equation, and we look for people who can fit those values - adaptable, collaborative, ethical, practical, and results-oriented.

I think it’s a lot about the culture we offer. We do things differently. Often in other firms, consultants can end up never meeting or seeing anybody else in the company, becoming more a part of the client’s culture than the consulting firm’s. To build our corporate culture, once a quarter, we get everybody together and share company updates. We even show them how much cash is in the bank. People get a chance to meet their colleagues and talk about what they’re working on. Face-to-face contact makes a big difference.

Once a year, we get everybody together for an annual meeting. We communicate the three-year plan for the company, where we’re going and why. Last year it was like a high school graduation. We introduced everyone in the company so they could put a face to the e-mail address. I think people really appreciate that.

When people travel, we try to do the four-day week where you’re out of town three nights. We try to get apartments and own a few cars because it’s more convenient to park a car at the airport instead of renting every week. We’ve paid expenses for people to join a gym and be healthy.

As for the awards we’ve received, many are based on employee input, so I’m sure our group wasn’t shy about giving an honest opinion. We also have an employee advisory council that’s the “keep me from doing anything too stupid” group. They take employee feedback and incorporate it into company operations and decisions.

Running a consulting firm looks easy – you just hire a bunch of good people and bill them out at multiples of what you pay them. What’s the hard part of the business that customers don’t see?

That’s probably why I at least look younger in the picture on the website– it is hard (laughs). Client needs and consultants’ skills and abilities don’t always match. It’s hard to have the perfect person there at the precise time. Getting the resource and managing expectations is the challenge.

We’ve perfected the criteria that we look for in people and set those expectations. We don’t want them leaving in the middle of a project because we didn’t figure out that they were unhappy or road-weary. We have had people leave and go to clients, and that’s fine because it’s additional career development for them. We can do that in a way that’s good for everybody. It’s a balancing act, and we have good partnerships with our clients. It ain’t easy (laughs).

Epic implementation work is a big part of your business. Do you see any end to their near-dominance of sales in the upper end market?

They certainly have been dominant in the last two years. Lots of our staff working on those types of projects have also worked in other environments like Cerner and on other types of technology projects. Epic seems to keep winning the new implementation deals, so that’s where the business is.

Of course, with any company, they need to be careful how they manage client expectations and balance the quality of their reputation and make sure they don’t bite off too much. Everybody runs that risk.

I like their model. They focus on delivering software, and since they don’t have a consulting division, they open that to preferred vendors. You have to go to training and stay certified. I like that, too. It sets a standard for performance.

What are the most common weaknesses in the IT governance of healthcare organizations?

A lot of places don’t have it (laughs.) They say they have a steering committee or governance process, but when you lift up the hood, there’s nothing working and no buy-in.

It’s hard to manage all those expectations. Hospitals are notorious for conflicting priorities and not enough resources. Nearly everywhere we do assessments, the IT department is working hard and doing a good job, but fighting battles on multiple fronts. Getting agreement on priorities can be a challenge, but it too can be particularly rewarding for the IT group. Those are some of my favorite projects.

You have an early warning system for industry trends because of your job. Tell me three trends you see that might surprise my readers.

I don’t know if I can surprise them. Your readers are in touch with what’s happening on the front lines.

One might be that we know hospital IT has always been under-funded, but I’m not sure hospitals know what they really need to spend. If you add up all the technology spend, it’s a lot more than the three or four percent claimed.

I believe personal health records will be an important component to consumers driving the integration of health records. My daughter is 7 1/2, and a healthy kid. It’s amazing to watch the health history of a child. She was born early, had a couple of minor things along the way, and always seems to get hurt when I’m watching her. She has 12 medical records. Consumer demands from cranky baby boomers like me used to using Quicken to get access to financial records will demand getting it done.

The whole concept of doing something with the data, which we all dream about doing, will be a challenge. The first EMR implementations will set up data warehouse and knowledge management but will figure out that they really can’t do anything with the data until they do an optimization and data cleanup to standardize. Before you get to clinical decision support, there will be an intermediate step of fixing a bunch of things from the initial implementation.

Tell me about Healthia Exchange.

Healthia Exchange is a sister company to Healthia Consulting that offers a tool to access insurance eligibility information from multiple sources all through one portal. It started here in Minnesota because of the complex payor environment, as only non-profit payors can operate in the state.

Walk into an admitting area and the only way they can get information is via a payor website. You’d find stickies all over the monitors for logging in to those sites. We invented something that’s not glamorous, but it’s quick, like a portal, that can do a broadcast to a number of payor sites if you don’t know who the insurance is from. I can put in a name, date of birth, and date of service in, and it will come back with a response within seconds.

We also do a lot of work in batch mode behind the scenes with accounts that are going to go to a self-pay status. It’s a last-ditch effort to find insurance for those patients. From a customer satisfaction standpoint for the hospitals, that’s good, because the customer doesn’t get a nasty bill when they really did have insurance.

One client says we fixed their eligibility problem and put $4 million on their bottom line. If the industry were able to fix eligibility verification problems across the country, that would pay for a lot of the EMR projects being done.

What do you want the company to look like in five years?

I don’t want to change the name again (laughs.) I don’t want to change a lot. We should be about double the size in five years, but that’s still small -- a couple of hundred people.

I expect a wider national presence with a few more offices. I want to continue to be the best and have more focus areas that we’re the best in.

I’d like to continue to have fun. I’m almost 50, so we always joke that I’m approaching the orthopedic years. It seemed so far away and now it’s at our doorstep. Jim and I say we’ve got another 10 years to fix things before we’re really dependent on healthcare, so in five years we’d better be about halfway done (laughs).

What part of your job is the most and least fun?

The fun part is that I get to be the guy who has the deep thoughts about the future. I get to think about all those strategic things and have fun pushing the envelope as to where we might go. I think I have a lot of fun being the reputation mentor for people.

The ‘not fun’ things are the surprises along the way. If you’re focused on quality, you don’t want surprises. That’s the stuff that keeps me up at night, making sure we keep a pulse on our staff and our clients.

We want to have at least 50% of our employees referred by other employees, kind of the Kevin Bacon thing where you don’t want too many degrees of separation. We want one degree. We’ve gone through cycles where we haven’t always known everybody, so the scary thing is when I put a consultant out there at a new client, I’m extending my own reputation. If we aren’t living up to my standards, that isn’t fun. Luckily, that doesn’t happen often.

Did you see any cool stuff at HIMSS?

Can I be honest? I don’t think so. I almost should go every other year because it always seems the same. There’s such vendor dominance that I think they’ll have to change something – at least it was quite evident this year but may have been due to the location and possibly because of the weather impact on attendance.

I didn’t really go to any great sessions. Colin Powell was great. He’s hilarious and a technology guy. He does a great George Bush imitation.

I came back a little cynical. It isn’t anyone’s fault at HIMSS; it’s just the nature of how big it’s gotten. They did a nice job when you think about trying to coordinate 25,000 people and keeping them focused. That’s a hard job.

In years past, there was always a theme like CPOE. Then, you’d go to sessions or the vendor floor, and there was some other theme that wasn’t publicized. I didn’t come back with that this year. I did learn that I have a severe allergy to mold and New Orleans is moldy these days. I had to moderate a session and lost my voice. People thought that was hilarious.

Who do you admire in the industry?

Having been a CIO with a technical background, I admire the clinical people. Nurses and doctors have hard jobs, especially with all that technology coming at them. I spent time in kids’ hospitals, and I especially admire those doctors for what they do, the number of patients they see, the amount of information coming at them.

In terms of people, I’ve been told that a lot of the cultural things we’ve established at Healthia remind them of the early days of First Consulting Group, and I do admire their founder, Jim Reep, for his vision of establishing a consulting firm exclusively focused on the healthcare industry and the culture he built early on of hiring the best in the industry. If we’re compared to FCG from those days, I like that.

CIOs have a hard job, so I admire those folks. That’s a real balancing act of demand and resources, a lot of conflicting resources. Hospitals CIOs are really dependent on those vendors, and that can be challenging.

Do you read HIStalk?

I do now. I can’t say I’ve read it a lot. My folks watch it. I don’t know if you know how many readers you have. You’re doing a good job being in front of things. It’s on my list of things to watch.