Everything You Need to Know About Health IT Consulting

The traveling consultant is the most common consulting path for EHR experts. It largely fits the image most people have in their mind when they think of consulting. Generally speaking, these consultants work on-site with one client at a time throughout the work week (which usually means Monday through Thursday here at Nordic). In exchange for a travel-heavy work life, they have the freedom to live anywhere they'd like. When working on-site, these consultants essentially become an extension of their client, working closely with their team to plan, conduct, and report on projects.

Traveling consultants can be salaried or compensated hourly, depending on their needs or preferences. Those who choose the hourly model typically thrive in environments where project variability is offset by higher potential reward — maximizing their earning potential and contract flexibility in exchange for a more project-to-project work style. For those who enjoy more consistent compensation and excellent benefits, the salary model offers greater stability and predictability.

Traveling consultants harness their strong interpersonal talents to lead people at all levels toward solutions to complex problems. In addition to being great communicators, they're also hands-on problem solvers, drawing on their skills and experience to identify and articulate challenges, present solutions, and work with client teams to bring great ideas to life.

Managed Services offers an opportunity in consulting for those who'd rather leave their suitcases in the closet and work from the office most of the time. Since this role is defined by exploring problems, we differentiate Managed Services from traveling consulting through the "analyst" title. This work tends to be more consistent from one day to the next and focuses on maintaining and supporting client systems in particular.

Given the different types and styles of work compared to other kinds of consulting, these folks enjoy a healthy salary packed with excellent benefits. And while prior health IT or Epic experience certainly helps, it's by no means required in order to be successful. Some of our most outstanding team members took their first step into health IT by joining our Managed Services team.

While all great consultants and analysts are strong communicators, managers, and systems experts, crushing support and maintenance tickets takes a particularly strong attention to detail and an analytical approach to problem-solving. Rather than convening with executives and leading teams on-site, Managed Services analysts thrive as problem-solvers — assessing and solving the root causes of technical problems as a team. Whatever your background, if you’re creative, driven, and passionate about making a difference, Managed Services offers a strong career path in health IT.

Advisory consultants are somewhat similar to traveling consultants but rely on their many years of leadership experience to guide their work. As such, they tend to have slightly longer industry track records than the average consultant. These experts may have EHR experience or come from a different area of health IT altogether. Either way, their experience partnering with executives fuels their success when consistently delivering excellence in advising, strategy, and leadership. 

On top of extensive health IT experience, these consultants have a track record of success and responsibilities across the areas of:

• Executive engagement and communication
• Team management
• Navigating complex, politically-charged environments
• Facilitating meetings
• Solving problems
• Identifying and discussing both big picture concepts and detailed solutions
• Relationship building
• Project management

And most importantly, they do all of this while displaying the maxims that define the Nordic team.

Week One

• First week check-in
  
  Whether you’re new to Nordic or one of our long-time consultants, your first touchpoint with us during a project is a week-one check-in with a dedicated practice manager, practice director, or account director. During this first check-in, you'll chat at length about how the project is going, how you’re feeling about it, any struggles you’re having, and where some extra guidance could help, if needed. If you prefer keeping a tighter connection with us, we’re happy to schedule recurring check-ins with practice managers too. Our goal is to make sure you’re achieving a good balance of work and feel confident and competent in everything in front of you.

• Engagement completion summary
  
  It might seem strange to talk about the completion of a project at the beginning of a project, but we promise there’s a method to our madness. The completion summary is an ongoing record our consultants update throughout the course of a project. Think of this as a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly status update on what you’ve accomplished so far. At the end, we’ll use these updates to refresh your resume and make sure no accomplishment goes unacknowledged. 

Week Two

• Engagement survey
  
  Sometime within the first two weeks of a project, we survey both you and your client to make sure everyone is headed in the right direction and feels confident they have what they need to make the project a success.

Throughout contract

• Ongoing communication
  
  Throughout your contract, you'll have regular check-ins with your home office team to answer questions, raise feedback, and work through any issues that arise. You may also have on-site gatherings with the home office to bond and get to know each other. 

Approaching end of contract

• End-of-contract call
  
  Typically, if you’re on a contract that’s three months or longer, we’ll reach out about 60 days before the end date to have an end-of-contract call. This is where we lean on your instincts to get a sense for whether or not there may be an opportunity to extend your project beyond its current end date, and if so, whether or not you’d like to be involved in it. For projects that are certain to end, we shift gears and discuss what you’d like to focus on working on next. For projects shorter than three months, we usually tackle these questions shortly after project start so we can get to work lining up a future project as soon as possible.

Customer Projects

70% to 80% of time spent in Managed Services

• Queue maintenance
  
  Managing active support tickets is a big part of Managed Services. This means making sure incoming client issues are handed off to the experts best suited to solve them while also ensuring customers are getting regular project updates when they're needed. We promise our clients that given the severity of the issue they bring to us, we’ll respond and resolve it within a certain amount of time. By diligently monitoring and maintaining our queue, we make sure we’re fulfilling that promise across the wide range of issues our customers rely on us to fix remotely.

• Specific issue resolution
  
  After an issue leaves the queue and finds its way to the right consultant, we methodically dig in and examine it from every angle before putting the fix in place. This is classic break/fix work. For smaller issues, this typically begins by teaming up with the end user team for a discovery session to fully diagnose and ultimately resolve the problem. When larger issues make it to our desks, we’ll go a step further and launch a kind of “mini optimization.” This lets us step back and make comprehensive enhancements to ensure the customer’s system is performing at peak efficiency when the root cause isn’t so simple to address. While support tickets drive most of the issue resolution work, some tasks, such as test builds and manual system updates, aren’t captured through traditional tickets. In these cases, we’ll partner with end user teams to perform system maintenance and make more sweeping changes to bring their systems up to speed.

• Extended projects
  
  When the same issue arises time and time again, resolving the root cause can require longer project work, which our Managed Services analysts gladly tackle too. Maybe a fix needs to be implemented throughout a number of client locations. Maybe new features need to be included in multiple ongoing projects. No matter what comes at us, our roster of highly experienced and qualified health IT professionals runs deep – an advantage that make us uniquely equipped to sit down at the table with healthcare organizations to plan and launch long-term projects handled entirely from home base.

Internal Projects

10% to 20% of time spent in Managed Services

• Management, mentoring, and growth enhancement
  
  In addition to helping our clients keep their systems running at peak performance, Managed Services analysts also help each other be better each day. We encourage everyone to set aside time to follow their interests and tackle projects aimed at improving themselves or the team, both in and outside of Epic. For a few hours each week, Managed Services team members become more like business analysts. They identify areas of operations or professional growth ripe for enhancement before working with mentors, or being a mentor themselves, to accomplish their goals or help others accomplish theirs.