Cambridge Management Group’s expertise includes:
- Aligning the work of clinicians and hospitals, in part through evidence-based design.
- Helping to turn around financially and clinically stressed hospitals and other healthcare organizations.
- Facilitating transitions to value- and risk-based models.
- Strengthening Federally Qualified Health Centers and other clinics.
- Helping organizations create and implement bundled payment plans.
- Providing healthcare organizations with strong interim leaders from CMG with senior management experience.
- Helping public- and private-sector organizations focus on population health across the socio-economic spectrum.
- Facilitating the creation and/or improvement of Accountable Care Organizations and Coordinated Care Organizations.
CMG has served clients in over 20 states
CMG helps pull Mass. clinic system from edge of receivership
Cambridge Management Group helped Fitchburg, Mass.-based Community Health Connections (CHC), a system of outpatient clinics providing medical, dental and behavioral-health services to thousands of mostly low-income residents in 20 communities, achieve an operational turnaround from near-receivership through a new focus on cross-functional cooperation and clearer and more consistent management.
CMG partner and senior adviser Lia Spiliotes became interim CEO and her CMG colleague Kevin Ward interim CFO to help move CHC to a new organizational culture.
Over the months of CMG’s leadership, through regular communication and increased collaboration, employees identified many administrative, financial and clinical concerns. Workable solutions were designed in response as the newly collaborative process led employees to feel more empowered, energized and invested in CHC’s success. The new culture spawned by this process was essential in helping to pull the organization from a financial abyss.
250+ bed Rocky Mountain regional referral hospital
This hospital sought help in improving physician confidence and collaboration. In letters to the local press, physicians wrote that management had jeopardized safety and clinical quality to maintain the annual operating budget. The CEO also recognized that poor physician-physician communication had resulted in a drop of regional referrals and a significant loss of market share to the regional competing hospital. Physicians invited CMG to assist them in sorting out the physicians’ shared clinical priorities. A $120 million rebuilding program is now underway based on the collective priorities that the physicians identified in their report.
300+ bed Northeastern community teaching hospital
This 300+ bed Northeastern community teaching hospital sought help in dealing with an annual operating loss of $20 million. Management was concerned that physicians lacked a sense of accountability for the hospital’s success and survival, viewing financial losses on items such as expensive prostheses as the hospital’s problem.
Physicians asked CMG to help them with a structured dialogue process because they felt that physicians needed a voice in clinical priority setting. By participating in the process, physicians helped to reset the strategic direction away from competing as a high-tech provider toward improving service to patients and their families and toward improving the practice environment for physicians.
300+ bed metropolitan West Coast community teaching hospital
This hospital sought help in planning for new hospital construction required for compliance with state earthquake mandates. The CMO and CEO felt that physician morale had deteriorated as a result of decreasing reimbursement and increasing regulations, expenses and expectations, making it difficult for physicians and management to work interdependently.
The physicians invited CMG to facilitate an eight-month structured dialogue process in which a medical advisory panel composed of practicing physicians heard presenters from 25 departments talk about their departments’ recommendations to improve care in the community over the next three to five years. Physicians working with management and the board planned to implement their top three priorities, including a multidisciplinary acute-stroke center and task forces to study and improve throughput in the Operating Room and in the Emergency Department. Physicians and management also went into discussion to build a joint outpatient cardiovascular-imaging center.
A bundled-payment program for total knee replacement draws praise in Pennsylvania
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CMG works with CCO to boost efficiency, improve care
Cambridge Management Group was engaged by Jackson Care Connect (JCC), a Coordinated Care Organization in Jackson County, Ore., to help JCC speed its mission to improve care for its population while saving money. JCC is an insurance organization created to serve mostly low-income people on Medicaid.
Informing all of CMG’s work in Jackson County was its knowledge of the social determinants of health and of how healthcare-related institutions can best address them.
CMG studied the individual parts of the healthcare environment in which JCC operates and then helped all the main players understand the linkages between them. The firm then suggested how JCC could coordinate all these moving parts to meet the Triple Aim of improving the individual-patient’s experience; elevating the health of the JCC population – essential in a population-health-focused organizations such as JCC — and cutting the per-capita cost of healthcare.
A key consideration, of course, was the urgency to move to fee for value from fee for service. CMG has spent much time in the past few years facilitating that transition for its clients.
Thus CMG helped to strengthen healthcare-sector operational efficiencies in JacksonCounty, paving the way for better population health, and major cost savings, in the years to come.
Our Clients are Saying...
With decades of practical experience and high emotional intelligence, Cambridge Management Group guided our physicians to work better among themselves and with our administration to improve clinical outcomes and the overall effectiveness of our hospital.
When CMG started its work with us, civil discourse was often lacking and various individuals and fiefdoms avoided cooperation. CMG very carefully helped develop an atmosphere of trust and teamwork, without sacrificing the needed honest exchange of views. This was crucial in efforts to create our now very well-established medical advisory panel, which CMG helped structure and that continues to strengthen our institution.
Cambridge Management Group provided invaluable assistance in re-engaging the medical community at Porter Adventist Hospital (Denver) in the institution’s work. CMG’s ability to connect with physicians using a town hall model provided a rich setting for dialogue and progress. After years of mistrust and poor communication, the work of CMG’s Bob Harrington and his team helped establish a platform for collaboration that still exists.
Through their wide network of connections, CMG was able to assemble a team with the skills unique to our organizational needs. Key to CMG’s success in organizational transformation is its ability to educate and empower board members and staff at all levels of the organization to make data-driven decisions.
Healthcare reform has imposed (at times unwelcome) demands on both physicians and hospitals. Additional pressures are coming from value-hungry consumers and employers. The need to deliver “population-health” solutions demands a higher degree of collaboration between clinicians and hospital administrators. CMG’s extensive experience dealing with physicians and hospitals is evident in its approach and tactics when evaluating levels of collaboration between physicians and administrators and suggesting solutions.
CMG was able to facilitate the identification of key physician leaders – from peer (and administrative) recommendations – and enlist some of those to serve on PinnacleHealth’s Medical Advisory Panel when I served as chief clinical officer of Pinnacle, a large health system in central Pennsylvania. CMG’s “healthcare content-ready” knowledge and experience enable them to facilitate the various projects needed to achieve the desired results.
As a former client, at hospitals in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, I find Cambridge Management Group one of the best firms for working with physicians and hospital managements to understand their joint policy and operational challenges and to find the best ways to overcome those challenges. The mission throughout is to create a strategic focus on improving institutional performance to better serve patients.
