Diamond Leverages Wealth, Targets Health
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For the consulting industry, healthcare is
shaping up to be a vast and fruitful frontier, according to Patricia O'Brien-Rossiter, a former trauma unit surgeon (think ER, the TV show) turned consultant, whose career path has led across Booz-Allen, IBM, Accenture, KPMG, and now Diamond Management & Technology. Driving this market is what O'Brien-Rossiter calls health-wealth convergence.
Health-wealth convergence can be seen in the sudden proliferation of initiatives focused on the cost of healthcare. These go under a variety of labels — consumer-directed healthcare, health savings accounts (HSA), high-deductible health insurance. "There is a new, evolving health marketplace," says O'Brien-Rossiter, in which consulting firms like Diamond and others can play a central role.
Consulting firms are needed to help the various healthcare players — providers, insurers, practitioners — correctly identify and assess the risks, map the information flow, manage the transactions, understand the barriers, and capitalize on the opportunities. For example, "if you are a health plan, what are your core competencies and any competencies in various adjacent areas? How do you preserve revenue in the advent of high-deductible health plans?" asks O'Brien-Rossiter.
"HSAs are going to emerge as a major type of investment vehicle," especially as employers increasingly wrestle with the high cost of healthcare, continues O'Brien-Rossiter. Some experts estimate that people will need $200,000 or more in their HSA when they retire, she reports.
A recent symposium organized by Goldman Sachs and in which O'Brien-Rossiter participated demonstrated the great interest being generated by health-wealth convergence. Today, the health-wealth issue "sits on the bleeding edge between healthcare and financial services," says O'Brien-Rossiter. The combination of healthcare and financial services, of industry knowledge and technical capabilities, will prove the key to success in this market. Diamond jumped into healthcare consulting in a big way over a year ago. Today, it offers diagnostics, capabilities assessment, IT strategy, and channel strategies that address the go-to-market issues.
What the healthcare industry really is confronting is the rise of consumer-directed healthcare, a new phenomenon. Consumer-directed healthcare represents a revolution in healthcare that proponents of health-wealth convergence are counting on. Success will require information systems that streamline the flow of patient and medical information and transaction systems to process the flow of revenue, new
systems architecture and design, and new data models. At stake is the future of the private healthcare system in the face of universal healthcare, an anathema to the proponents of health-wealth convergence.
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