Goldman-Sachs Announces Their Intentions to Enter Health IT Consulting – Pitching Those Algorithms

You know there’s a bit of tongue and cheek here but it is not far off of what everyone is promoting today and this is a very good example of what the monetary thought processes are, so apply these to healthcare and the jigs up as far as better care for anyone, it’s all about money and we are screwed. In a few days all the big companies listed on the exchange will be attending the Goldman Sachs Thirty-First Annual Global Healthcare Conference, to talk up their business, look for money, investors and basically talk about making more profits. This event is held every year; however the stakes due to economic conditions are very different now, especially in view of financial reform and responsibility.

All the major drug companies will be there and the same with all the major health insurers. You can Google up the conference and see pages of press releases on who’s attending, WellPoint is right up there in the top of the search and they might be explaining in detail as to why they had to succumb to a 20% premiums increase instead of the 39% that got investors all excited.

Blue Cross in California Reworks The Algorithms and Announces a 20% Rate Increase Effective September 1st

There certainly stands to be a lot of talk about “those algos” (algorithms) as that is what runs Wall Street and investments an a ton load of healthcare too.
I like the part in the body below on the article written about the role of the CIO in the money making part of this by “double dipping” the IT staff and who knows perhaps some of this has already happened and we are just not aware of it.

Write those consulting reports too as later whether truthful or not you can use them for sales and marketing, ramp up those numbers on the medications and clinical trials, they only get published in medical journals anyway, and the doctors will get over it, beside it may takes years for them to catch on.

This is the investment business whereby to make a profit just throw some computers and software at the facilities and sit back and count the money.

If this is the case the truth is out – healthcare reform in this format is not anything about generating better care, it’s all about the money. I’ll give you a good example here on cold and not caring attitudes and positions with the Century City Hospital that closed in October of 2008 as they ran out of money.

Desperate Hospitals - Century City Doctors Hospital (Los Angeles) begins shutting down, others file Chapter 11 to reorganize

This great facility was so close that the Los Angeles office of Goldman could almost spit on the building and it was re-opened as a state of the art facility and I’m sure saw some of the Goldman employees and the doctors that worked there. Did they offer – Nope. You know they were patients there with being able to order from the Wolfgang Puck menu and a lot of the movie “The Bucket List” was filmed here too.

This to me back in August of 2008 was one huge red flag when you have a state of the art hospital on the outskirts of Beverly Hills, in Century City where all the big corporate offices are (AIG is right there too) and they couldn’t raise any money and get financing, they don’t give a darn about healthcare so keep that foremost in the front of your mind.

So perhaps anyone taking them up on their offer might want to keep it quiet (grin). This is everything that healthcare “is not” about.

Well is this the next system to launch, the Goldman Sachs EHR system, like everything else it will have to be branded. BD

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Hard on the heels of Congressional testimony into their unbridled corporate avarice, executives from Goldman-Sachs announced their intention to enter the HIT consulting field.

Stacked Deck – you get paid to sell your next product(s)! While writing “consulting” reports, you load them up with recommendations for the client to buy your next product/service:

* If you are doing an RFP for a system selection, stack it with features for the HIS vendor your staff is trained to implement.

* If you are conducting an I.T assessment, recommend they either switch to that same HIS vendor, or outsource their I.T. department to you.

* If you are writing a strategic plan, make sure it includes a “clinical transformation” project that your staff R.N.s and M.D.s perform.

* If you are serving as an “interim” CIO, recommend they hire several other members of your firm for director/manager slots.

Revenue Mania – you can generate amazing numbers for Wall Street through outsourcing, which is the latest fad in I.T. management anyway:

* Say you to take over the 20 FTE staff of a hospital’s IT department, whose salaries and benefits total about $2 million per year,

* You tack on a 25 percent profit margin, now costing them $2.5 million a year, but getting far “better” results because of your expertise …

* Write a contract with SLAs as soft as frozen custard, with minimal penalties or remedies,

* If you sign a 10-year deal, you can book $25 million in revenue and $5 million in profit to your bottom line, all for the only cost of a sales presentation!

* Sell two or three of these gigs a year, and in three to five years, you’re a major player, and all with almost zero capital investment or risk!

But Wait – There’s More! – you can make even more money “double-dipping” the hospital’s I.T. staff you acquired through outsourcing:

* Every I.T. shop has a few superstars, experts in nurse informatics or Internet security, who are extremely talented and marketable.

* Since they now report to you, you can offer them “career opportunities” by selling them to other hospitals at high rates.

* Either transferring them full-time, or charging them out by the hour or the day, and all while the original hospital is paying for them!

* They report to you now, so no one can ask where they are or what they are doing, that’s your business …

* As long as you can keep up with the paltry SLAs you agreed to in your one-sided contract, with a pittance in penalties if ever violated.

What’s It Take? – But, you say we don’t know anything about health care? That hasn't stopped a bunch of hardware manufacturers lately:

* All they had was a big name and a billion-dollar balance sheet, just like us! Only time their executives were ever in a hospital was for youthful tonsillectomies …

* Yes, our main business is investment, not health care, but their main business is manufacturing computers--what’s that got to do with running a hospital?

* We’ll just buy up a few mid-sized HIT consulting firms to get a core of pros to start selling, motivate them with stock options, and away we go!

Sound a little amoral or underhanded? No more than selling investors mortgage derivatives, while at the same time short-selling them yourself. Yes, we think we’ve found us a new home: HIT consulting, here we come!