One on One with Chartis Group's Ken Graboys

The healthcare industry is changing rapidly. Advancements in technology, clinically integrated networks and more sophisticated analytics are fundamentally changing how care is delivered, leading to more effective outcomes for patients and greater efficiencies for healthcare providers. Aspen Advisors, a top-ranked IT services firm has joined the Chartis Group, a leading provider of strategic planning, accountable care, clinical transformation and information technology consulting services to the country's leading healthcare providers. Together they hope to leverage their complementary expertise to prepare clients for challenges emerging in healthcare today as well as new ones coming around the corner. Consulting caught up with Ken Graboys, co-founder and Managing Director of Chartis to talk about the partnership and how it will impact healthcare consulting.

Consulting: How did it come to pass that Aspen joined the Chartis Group?

Graboys: It was the culmination of a very deliberate effort. In healthcare it's no surprise that as we enter the next few years two elements of transformation are experiencing a real confluence. The first being healthcare reform, which has been taken to a point now where accountable care has become the closest to a representation of what the future of healthcare is going to look like. That represents an enormous amount of change healthcare providers are going through. At the same time, technology has achieved a scale and level of advancement both in terms of how clinical data can be used and emerging technologies changing the digital experience in such a way that the two forces represent a fundamental transformation of care and delivery over the next 5 to 10 years. For us to be able to provide leading-edge advisory services to our clients we knew we had to come together with a firm that had a reputation for thought leadership and IT in the healthcare space. When you look at the landscape there's only really one firm that has the experience, the capabilities, the respect of the industry and the knowledge base to bring those expertise to bear, and that's Aspen. We began working with them and it quickly became clear that culturally and from a mission perspective we were very aligned and that coming together we could do even more for the industry than separately.