Mark Wietecha's client list includes the premier hospitals in the country — Johns Hopkins, Duke, and the Mayo Clinic. But when he is asked about which accomplishments he is most proud of, the 47-year-old chairman of Kurt Salmon Associates cites some relationships he made during his first year as a consultant.
"Of all the famous projects and storied fights, I would point to the early ones where our tenure and continuity has made some real difference," says Wietecha, who joined KSA 20 years ago. "I still have some clients from the first year — two or three clients where the management teams are the same. We all started around the same time, in our 30s. When I look back, they've had tremendous success, due in part to the advice we've given them."
The McLaren Health Care Corporation, for example, started out as a regional $150 million business. It's now a $1.2 billion operation. Another less-known client is the Woman's Hospital of Baton Rouge, which was barely surviving two decades ago. Today, it's a not-for-profit that has doubled in size and emerged as the leading obstetric hospital in Louisiana, delivering more than 7,500 babies last year.
"We have been their strategy consultants for 20 years. Not everything has worked, for sure, but we've been partners. It's been kind of nice," says Wietecha, who guesses that he's worked with 120 different clients throughout his career.
One of the difficulties with implementing strategic advice in the premier institutions is that the "leadership positions have much higher turnover and much more discontinuity," says Wietecha. "The things you may have put into place may not be adopted or continued by the next management. There are more stories and the experiences are more colorful and quite exciting, and they are the guys who keep you going to work, but they don't represent the same continuity as the smaller guys."
But it's clear that his thought leadership with the larger, esteemed institutions, which set the pace for the industry, have had a broader impact on the healthcare market as a whole. Working on an assignment with Johns Hopkins in the early 1990s, he pioneered with Hopkins the "Ideal Patient Encounter," which has changed the way that ambulatory care is delivered to patients nationwide.
"We modeled the entire operation on how we'd like it to work from the patient standpoint, and translated it into operations and facilities that would be needed to deal with that," Wietecha explains.
The latest interpretation of that work is being used at the University of Colorado Hospital, another client. There, only 15 percent of patients report having to wait to see a doctor, meals come from room service and are delivered when patients want to eat, and every room has a private bathroom. Colorado officials report that this new, patient-centered way of doing business does not cost them any more.
"It's the future of healthcare," Wietecha says. And it was a future that he foresaw a decade ago.
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