Michael Lipari

Healthvision, a new startup, had developed a concept for a consumer and patient communications platform for their hospital customers. I was hired to drive innovation and lead new product development. We worked with our customers to understand their needs, and what products and services would meet those needs. In the first 12 months, we had refined the concept, developed prototypes, and partnered with development to create a Cloud-based software solution which was launched into the test market. After three months in the test market, we refined the solution and launched nationally.

Novation, a hospital operations consulting organization, had developed a new consulting service to help customers optimize their contracts with their service providers (e.g., IT services, legal services facilities maintenance services, food service, linens, and many other areas). After successfully deploying the service with several hospital clients, the organization needed to hire and ramp up their delivery team. I was hired to productize the service. We worked with the service delivery team to define standard processes, templates, and training so that the organization could roll out the service across a new team of 15 consultants.

Novation, a leading healthcare supply chain company, provided contracting services to lower the cost of supplies and goods used by hospitals. The company offered two levels of service, standard pre-negotiated contracts and custom contracting, a consulting service where they negotiated on behalf of individual organizations. With their custom contracting services, they found that in approximately 75% of cases, they could get significant savings of between 25%-40%. For the other 25% of the time, the savings was between 10% and 20%, leading to client dissatisfaction. I was hired to segment the market and understand what drove the difference in savings and client satisfaction. By segmenting the market based on physician engagement and leadership within the hospital, we were able to develop a second low touch custom option that provided 25% of clients the same 10%-25% cost reduction but at a much lower cost to the client.

As the internet and social media were changing the way marketing was done in healthcare, Healthvision developed software solutions that helped hospitals communicate with their consumers and patients. With the advent of WebMD, local hospitals were losing consumers to a national player as they searched for health information.

My team developed services that helped hospitals utilize internet tools to market to their consumers and convert healthcare content consumers into patients. The solutions included prescribed content based on their diagnosis, lab tests, and prescription drugs. The solutions drove local area consumers to their content websites to gather medically approved material and then converted them to patients through patient communication tools.

Healthvision had entered the health information exchange market as a leader with Cloud-based solutions. As the market matured, the organization was faced with margin compression, requiring us to operate more efficiently to deliver new products and innovation with fewer resources. As the leader of the strategic planning and product management, I developed a plan that would allow us to reduce our new product development cycle times, and improve organizational performance. We consolidated the Technical Development team and Operations team under Product Management to streamline resource allocations and decision-making. We also moved the team to an Agile development process from the previous Waterfall process.

Vizient, a $600 million healthcare analytics and services company, had lost customers to new competitors that entered the market and provided a more a la carte pricing and packaging model. I was hired to work with Vizient's VP of Strategy and VP of Finance to develop and test new pricing models. After evaluating the impact of bundled pricing on other industries, including cable TV, we built an analytics model that allowed us to test pricing options with customers. The analysis tool allowed us to play what-if scenarios to understand the customer's propensity to purchase more services under an a la carte packaging and pricing option. We combined this tool with primary research to evaluate revenue changes at a customer level and across all customers. After completing testing, we rolled out new pricing and packaging models. The result was an increase in total revenue and improved customer satisfaction.

VHA had developed a supply chain consulting services business with revenues of $250 million. As the organization evaluated entering the analytics market, senior management was concerned about new business cannibalizing the existing business rather than being accretive. I was hired to work with the various business units to deliver solutions that would leverage the synergies across business. Working with the senior leaders of each business unit, we developed a vision for a new supply chain analytics combined with advisory services.
The new offering leveraged MicroStrategy analytics to provide both the consulting team and customers with insights into their supply chain cost relative to other customers in the same industry. Working with development, we turned the product concept into commercial products that included both the analytics software tools for customers, and a service offering that gave both the customers and the consulting team insights into a customers' performance. By combining software and service offerings, we made the product more valuable and also uncovered consulting opportunities for the consulting portion of the business.

Novation had created a consulting service which helped their hospital customers negotiate better pricing on key services such as food service, laundry services, elevator maintenance, data service, medical equipment, and testing device maintenance, to name a few. They wanted to gain better insights into what was driving pricing variations between customers. The issue with service pricing is that the drivers of price and costs are highly variable by category, and the suppliers do not share pricing levers. For example, in elevator maintenance, the cost varies based on the location of the building (rural versus urban) the type of elevator (mechanical versus hydraulic), the number of elevators per building, and the maintenance periods. By leveraging MicroStrategy analytics tools and their machine learning solutions, we were able to input hundreds of contracts for each service area and reverse-engineer pricing models that led to better and more advanced pricing negotiations with the service provider.