Andrea Nicholas, President, Founder , OptimizeHealth After over a decade of overseeing management consulting engagements from both the corporate and consulting angle, Andrea Nicholas yearned to provide superior consulting and technology services where the focus was solely on client satisfaction. This desire spurred the genesis of OptimizeHealth, a technology consulting firm that delivers healthcare industry customer value through expert consultants and proven models. OptimizeHealth’s dynamic team consists of members having over 15 years of experience in healthcare and technology, multiple certifications in their respective areas of expertise, and advanced degrees in both management and technical studies. The company specializes not only in IT management consulting, but also in technical areas such as server configurations, hosting, applications, custom development, helpdesks, and so on. In 2017, the company made available the first BI tool built by healthcare leaders for healthcare leaders called VitalsBI™.
“Our healthcare technology experts understand the nuanced challenges of customers in this highly regulated and complex industry. We have an entire framework to handle the managerial aspects and we provide technical assistance in successfully overcoming the predicaments for our customers,” says Andrea. OptimizeHealth’s consulting focuses on IT strategies and services, project delivery, IT turnarounds, and organizational staffing and modeling.
On the technical side, OptimizeHealth employs a proven model for software selection, helping customers narrow down their options and find the best solution and vendor for their enterprise. The company also offers interoperability, enterprise procurement, and, most recently, outsourced IT options for small healthcare firms who have significant technology needs, but limited resources. “We adapt the learning from our consulting division, working with large customers to support our medium and small clients in a secure, robust, affordable way,” says Greg Nicholas, Principal at OptimizeHealth, and a healthcare technology expert with over 20 years of experience as a CIO.
Our ability to stay focused on customer satisfaction has helped us forge these long-standing partnerships in the healthcare industry
One such learning that Greg elucidates is the success story that OptimizeHealth shares with Cardinal Health, a Fortune 500 healthcare services company. The most recent engagement with this client involved integration at an advanced level, using Dell Boomi integrations services for interoperability. The project drove several benefits for Cardinal Health, the prime one being connectivity of systems. OptimizeHealth integrated Cardinal Health’s back-end dispensing systems to streamline the delivery of specialty pharmaceuticals.
2017 has been a busy one for the company, with the release of its HIPAA-compliant analytics platform, VitalsBI. Based on the inputs from experts in healthcare, IT, and business, both within the organization as well as the industry at large, VitalsBI aggregates data from a variety of sources and formats, and sifts value out of the volume. Built in the Azure cloud, the platform uses HL7 secure connections to stream data to and from in a variety of environments, mashes up the data in the back end using elasticube technology, and publishes insights to authenticated users in a web portal. More importantly, VitalsBI enables clinical, business and operations leaders to understand latent correlations between seemingly unrelated areas to confidently make decisions which optimize performance.
Early next year, a voice-activation capability will be added to VitalsBI, and the analytics platform will be extended to analyze specific events, i.e., patient falls, in an effort to anticipate and avoid them. At a broader level, OptimizeHealth will continue expanding its expertise in the IT management area, while strengthening its focus on customer retention. “Around 80 percent of our work is from our existing customers,” says Andrea. “Our ability to stay focused on customer satisfaction has helped us forge these long-standing partnerships in the healthcare industry.”
