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Sometimes Consultants Surprise You with Their...

Sometimes Consultants Surprise You with Their Reports

Print - FPinfomart - Newstex Blogs - Wednesday June 25th, 2008

Reports from healthcare consultants can sometimes be warmed-over pap or merely external validation of decisions already made by hospital executives. On occasion, however, reports from consultants can surprise you. This was obviously the situation described in the following article with boldface emphasis mine (see: WVU dumps its consultant):

West Virginia University officials fired a $75,000-a-month consulting firm Friday, saying the consultants' scathing report about WVU's health science division and affiliated hospitals was full of errors and misunderstandings. The nine-page report, by R&V Associates of Pittsburgh, alleged that "serious," "intolerable" and "alarming" problems at WVU hospitals put patients' lives at risk.The consultants cited the unexpected deaths of two children and an adult. They also criticized WVU for serious shortages of general surgeons, anesthesiologists and heart surgeons that forced hospitals to send patients to facilities in Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh. WVU said R&V reached false conclusions, in some cases, and the university already was working to fix other problems brought up in the report....[The interim vice president of health sciences] said the university plans to hire another outside consultant that "has experience with academic medical centers." R&V Associates, which has been paid $321,789, plus expenses, for its work since March, has said the report is accurate.

What in the world is going on here? A consulting firm accuses the hospital that engages it of putting "patients' lives at risk." It then adds insult to injury by inserting this claim in only a nine-page report. However, the interim vice president of health sciences at WVU hospitals seems to be heading in the right direction when he says that the organization is now seeking another consultant with "experience with academic medical centers." The web site of R&V Associates describes the discharged firm as specializing in "business consulting and crisis management." It's not clear from the article whether the officials at WVU hospitals anticipated that the consulting firm that they first engaged would precipitate the crisis that now apparently needs to be managed by yet another set of consultants.

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