Excellence in Healthcare
Jay Burkett
Partner, Healthcare Practice
Grant Thornton
In the past five years, Grant Thornton's Healthcare practice has increased five-fold, to well over 1,000 clients and over $70 million in revenue. While success like this is certainly a team effort, the firm puts the lion's share of credit on the shoulders of Jay Burkett, the leader of the Revenue Cycle practice within the healthcare group.
"This rapid growth and success is in no small part a result of the addition of the Business Advisory Services Group, which Jay played an instrumental role in launching in 2010. His deep client relationships and his passion for the healthcare industry transcend the entire practice," the firm's leaders shared in their nomination.
Burkett credits the firm's investment priorities as the real reason for the practice's tremendous accomplishment. "The biggest reason for the growth and success—and this is what we established from the moment we decided to build and grow a healthcare practice—was our ability to go out and invest in people. It's the most important factor," he says.
And with the right people, the firm has been able to pursue some significant opportunities; most notably, next year's ICD-10 deadline (which expands the current way health providers code various diseases, symptoms, and other medical notes, by creating more than 16,000 different classifications). From a technical compliance perspective, ICD-10 has a lot of similarities to Y2K. But for forward-thinking healthcare consultants, there's a bigger play.
"There's a longer-term opportunity here, too," Burkett says. By being able to better examine aggregated medical records, diagnosis and results, "we can give doctors better clinical data."
That kind of information would not only lead to a far better outcome for the patient, but would also save huge healthcare costs. "The challenge for us is to figure out how the healthcare system can do things better, faster, and less expensively."
—Jess Scheer
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