This month marks the end my 5th year as an independent consultant. Over that time, I've had the opportunity to complete many great projects for a variety of clients, large and small. A basic objective has always been to provide services to both  manufacturers and health care providers. The general knowledge gained -- both current trends and the depths of complex issues -- from working with providers has always benefited my manufacturer clients, the same holds true for providers based on the perspectives gained working for manufacturers.

While I've done projects for some great health care providers (Providence, RWJUH, Spectrum and Partners), most of my business has been on the vendor side. This past fall Marilyn Hailperin of Santa Rosa Consulting contacted me about working for their firm. We have entered into an agreement where all of my consulting for health care providers is done through Santa Rosa, while I continue to pursue consulting business with manufacturers as Medical Connectivity Consulting.

Santa Rosa Consulting was founded this year by Richard Helppie, the founder, Chair and CEO for Superior Consultant. One of the hospital consulting market segments Santa Rosa is targeting is point of care workflow automation and medical device integration. Here's more from the press release:

As part of the Santa Rosa team, Mr. Gee will provide consulting services related to point-of-care technology strategy development, clinical workflow optimization, technology vendor selection, risk management of converged medical device/enterprise networks, and support for Santa Rosa’s PCDI [Patient Care Device Integration] implementation team.

Santa Rosa Associate Partner and National Practice Director for PCDI, Marilyn Hailperin, says, “We are pleased to have someone of Tim’s caliber on our team. He has long been an advocate and recognized authority on medical device connectivity. Tim brings essential real-world knowledge and expertise to our clients to maximize their investment in point-of-care technology, achieve the benefits of patient care device integration with information systems, and attain “meaningful use” certification with respect to medical device interoperability.”

While Santa Rosa gets to use me in their provider practice, my provider clients also benefit in a number of ways:

  • With hundreds of consultants, Santa Rosa can provide resources to increase the size and scope of projects I'm able to take on
  • Santa Rosa also provides the traditional health care IT consulting firm infrastructure (handling invoicing, expences and project management) that solo consultants are hard pressed to provide
  • Now Santa Rosa's provider clients will benefit from my manufacturer consulting experience, in addition to my subject matter expertise

As a principal consultant for Santa Rosa, I've completed my first engagement for Marilyn, defining an operating framework for the deployment and ongoing support of patient care device integration at Virtua Health. The main deliverables for this engagement were 22 standard operating procedures and 2 additional controlled documents (more on this later). You can read about the overall project, including the operating framework in this testimonial.

Besides completing consulting engagements, I'll be helping Santa Rosa promote their PCDI practice. To that end, I gave a keynote at the NJ HIMSS Chapter Fall 2009 conference. You can download the presentation here (warning, it's big). There's also some upcoming webinars in the works for some other regional HIMSS chapters. Finally, I will also be writing blog posts on the Santa Rosa Team Blog (here's the first post). You can also see the Santa Rosa Consulting banner in the right hand column, click on that to straigh to the Santa Rosa site.

I'm very excited to be working with such a successful and experienced team as the people at Santa Rosa Consulting.

The small photo accompanying this post is of a portion of the PCDI integration lab at Virtua Health, managed by Linda Chan.