A promising new Nashville corporate healthcare venture is merging the worlds of business and legal consulting – services traditionally offered by separate professionals at separate firms.
DW Franklin Consulting Group is a full-service healthcare firm providing comprehensive consulting in the areas of government relations and general business guidance, strategic planning and more. Launched recently by international law firm Dickinson Wright PLLC, DW Franklin Consulting Group is led by Chief Executive Officer C. Timothy Gary and Consulting Leader Kerry Hart. Both are healthcare veterans with unique perspectives into a constantly evolving industry.
A Different Approach
An MBA and attorney with 24 years of experience, Gary often advised executives on business issues, as well as legal matters. “I couldn’t figure out where the lines were between giving strategic and financial advice and legal advice in my law practice,” he said. “Along the way, it occurred to me it was a fairly unique approach to provide services different than just law.”
That idea morphed into a business plan that eventually caught the attention of Dickinson Wright. Gary soon brought on Hart, a business acquaintance and former healthcare CEO who had founded a healthcare consulting company specializing in large-scale performance improvement.
“As a CEO and C-suite advisor, it was very easy to see that the more regulated healthcare became, the more disjointed it seemed management input was getting,” Kerry said. “When you’re trying to figure out how to take the company to the next level, you have your strategist coming up with one point, your attorney telling you something different and your compliance people pulling their hair out. It’s very complicated, but we can now bring a truly integrative set of perspectives in a very simultaneously engineered solution.”
“They’re Bringing in Consultants?”
While DW Franklin’s clients are predominately small- to medium-size healthcare companies, they are also working with two Fortune 100 companies – proof that the market might be bigger than what the executives originally thought. While clients typically have in-house legal and strategic advisors, they’re increasingly overwhelmed by the industry’s unprecedented legal and business model shifts. DW Franklin’s non-proprietary approach allows for candid, open conversations where each player brings a vastly unique perspective to the table.
“In-house staff have a very deep knowledge of processes within their business, and we’re not ever going to know as much about their specific business as they do,” Gary said. “We bring a much broader focus and have seen many times something that is a unique situation to them. It’s an opportunity to peer over walls in a way that they can’t; and when you put those two dimensions together, you start getting well-calculated solutions.”
Clients also have access to Dickinson Wright’s 400-plus lawyers. But unlike traditional law offices, DW Franklin also recruits expert business and government relation consultants, offering flexibility and integrative solutions that often aren’t available in the more conventional law firm structure. They also pride themselves in recruiting seasoned, successful consultants with ‘real-world’ experience.
“We’ll be looking for folks who have run companies or worked for private equity, who have had quarterly expectations breathing down their necks and performed well,” Gary said. “We’re not the type that will unload a busload of new MBAs at a doorstop to tell a 30-year veteran how to run a business. We’re about respect, appreciation, and knowledge sharing, and we want to model that in the way we work with people.”
New Rules for a New Game
Much of their work has been spent navigating waters stirred up by the Affordable Care Act, bundled payments and cost sharing initiatives. While such initiatives make sense from a business standpoint, Gary said laws often haven’t kept up.
“We still have Stark Law, the False Claims Act and other pre-ACA regulatory systems in place,” Gary said. “While CMS is pushing folks to be innovative and rewarding providers for higher quality care, the Department of Justice is having record years on the enforcement side. It’s a very interesting dynamic.”
Hart said while market factors, competition and capital were driving forces in developing healthcare strategy and operational imperatives several years ago, legal and regulatory drivers are primary agents today.
“Navigating the healthcare marketplace today is both complex and arduous,” Hart explained. “In partnering with Dickinson Wright, we bridge legal and regulatory compliance guidance with operational consultancy, which is very timely for today’s market – if not overdue.”
Hart added clients also are looking for help on strategic repositioning. “As lines are getting moved by regulatory changes, healthcare has become one big, complex set of relationships really,” he said. That’s because payers are dealing with providers, patients and suppliers … with a lot of intermediaries in between.
That movement causes everyone to have to reposition for optimal performance, Hart said. He guides his team through efficient processes to reposition companies strategically and operationally. They also address changes to the reimbursement environment, streamlining payment issues that help drive operational efficiency.
“We’re very experienced and value-added at helping architect and innovate operational models to meet customer obligations in a more efficient way,” Hart said. “We see that management priority cycle through every three to four years, and we’re coming strongly into that in 2016.”
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