Halley Consulting Company History

The Halley Consulting Group is a physician practice management and consulting firm specializing in the strategic development and performance turnaround of both hospital-owned medical practice networks and large independent medical offices. The firm was originally organized in 1995 as Ambulatory Management Services, Inc. (AMS), a subsidiary of Holy Cross Health System Corporation, to meet the needs of its member hospitals nationally. Following the merger of Holy Cross and Mercy Health Services in 2000, AMS became a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of Trinity Health, Novi, Michigan. In 2005, AMS became The Halley Consulting Group, LLC, a privately held company. The firm is headquartered in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.

Halley Consulting works with clients nationwide, including health systems and individual hospitals that own medical practice networks, as well as private practice physicians. They provide services through traditional consulting arrangements and interim management contracts. The firm has served physician groups as small as 10 providers and health systems with up to 800 providers of varying specialties all across the United States. Hospital-owned networks employing several hundred providers use the Halley Consulting financial and statistical model as the basis for their management decisions and performance improvement efforts.

 

 

Marc Halley, the firm’s President and Chief Executive Officer, literally “wrote the book” on hospital ownership of medical practices as a competitive strategy. The Primary-Care Market Share Connection: How Hospitals Achieve Competitive Advantage was published by Health Administration Press, the publishing arm of The American College of Healthcare Executives, in March 2007. In addition, Marc Halley, Will Reiser and Brian Morton contributed several chapters to a three-volume set of books titled The Business of Healthcare (Praeger, December 2007).

Finally, the Halley Consulting team wrote and published The Medical Practice Start-Up Guide (Marc Halley and Michael Ferry, editors), released in August 2008 by Greenbranch Publishing. This manual is based on years of experience helping new physicians start medical practices, helping established physicians add a partner, consolidating existing practices into larger groups, and acquiring medical practices on behalf of their hospital clients.

For consulting clients, the Halley deliverables define the firm as the leading national expert in hospital-owned medical practice network management. Their processes are always collaborative in nature, seeking to unite hospital executives and employed/affiliated physicians around shared operational objectives, policies and processes. Further, their work always takes into account each client’s unique operational situation. Halley Consulting’s final deliverables are not cookie-cutter PowerPoint presentations, but real “playbooks” that have solid strategic, operational and financial impact.

The team at Halley Consulting has built their reputation on managing change in hospital and medical practice organizations, a challenge that many firms avoid because of the associated political and financial risks. As a result, the Halley team members think like managers rather than traditional consultants. Halley Consulting Group executives are trained and experienced implementers who have worked as leaders on the hospital side as well as in hospital-owned physician practices. Most of the firm’s executives have been in the business of practice start-up and management for 10 years or more.