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While Houston-based Noah Consulting may be a relatively new firm, its leaders have the experience to guide it to becoming a serious health care consulting player. Noah's founding partners previously worked together to build Knightsbridge Solutions, a consultancy focused on business intelligence, data warehousing, and data integration and information quality. In just eight years, the firm grew from a $3 million boutique to an $80 million firm, before selling to HP in early 2007. Five former Knightsbridge executives recently left HP to form Noah, taking their legacy firm's vertical skill sets and focusing them on two industries: health and life sciences, and energy. To learn more about the firm's plans, Consulting sat down with David Grice, Noah Consulting's Health and Life Sciences practice leader.
Consulting: What led you to want to leave HP and start a new firm?
Grice: I wanted to go back to an organization that was: smaller, more entrepreneurial, solely focused on business intelligence – not products, and focused around industry issues. All of the Noah guys come from consulting firms and have a strong industry bend. I've got a health care and life sciences background and others have energy or oil and gas backgrounds. At larger organizations, an industry focus was less important than the horizontal.
Consulting: What are the biggest healthcare issues and how is Noah positioned to tackle them?
Grice: From the provider side, EMR – or Electronic Medical Records – pose a huge opportunity. The new requirements promote a significant collection of data. And where Noah can play is in turning that data into information. Healthcare is the most data intense industry in the US. And data needs to be turned into information more now than ever before. Without the ability to draw out information from data, it just becomes noise. And healthcare providers need information to make the right decisions.
It's one thing to simply create a new system and then start analyzing that as it comes in. However, providers are also facing the challenge of what to do with all of the historical data. And this is where there's more unstructured data than really any other industry out there. Providers have devoted massive wings to archive paper medical records. Hospitals and other providers need help from firms like Noah to convert those warehouses of paper into a format where queries can be used to get data.
Consulting: What kind of usable information can Noah help draw out of the medical records?
Grice: Once an EMR system is in place, doctors will be able to make better medical decisions. For example, a doctor could use these electronic data to look at all diabetics for ways to establish and improve best practices. And the data pool wouldn't just be limited to the doctor's patients. There's an increasing push to mandate electronic medical records across organizations, across regions, and throughout the provider universe from physicians' offices to outpatient facilities, etc. And we believe that firms like Noah consulting will be needed to help integrate the data and perform analytics.
Consulting: What about the opportunities facing the payer side – both public and private healthcare insurers.
Grice: We see such significant change on the horizon that it is almost overwhelming. It's too early to know what will pass through Congress, but there's the chance that there will be some type of reform that could dramatically change the entire payer system.
Putting aside whatever Washington does, there are still big issues facing this side of the industry. There's an aging population, which will bring with it higher healthcare costs. And all healthcare payers are under intense cost pressure. As a result, they are in the most need for improved intelligence, specifically, around the area of medical management. By helping to build the right analytics system for payers, we can allow them to remain viable.
Whether or not payers are competing against each other or a national public plan, analytics are key to their survival. Understanding the most cost effective and clinically effective means makes them profitable; failing to do so makes them unsustainable.
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