PM 940: Culminating Experience Organizational Profile
The Lewin Group, Falls Church, Virginia
Akriti Rai
06/18/2017
I. Summary
The Lewin Group is a leading national health care and human services consulting firm. The work in the areas of health care primarily with organizations that impact policy and implement projects. They work alongside the federal, state, local governments, public and private health agencies, and also not for profits devise strategies and develop excellence to grapple with challenges the healthcare. As it may hold true for any consulting firm working with government agencies, the recent political changes in the country have impacted some of the work that is done at Lewin. In the last 6 months, Lewin has faced some challenges and doubt about the future of their work. This has not only decreased employee morale, but also changed the way they intended to grow. Some of these changes that arise due to changes in administration tend to create some gaps in the way that Lewin delivers, which will be addressed in the sections below.
II. Organizational goals and objectives
The Lewin Group comprises of people that come from various walks of life. Consultants at the organization have diverse set of talents and expertise. However, the one thing that they all share in common is the ability to solve healthcare problems in a meaningful and holistic way. The Lewin Group is an Optum company, a wholly owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. 1 It is important to point out here, that while Lewin falls under the purview of the aforementioned companies, their work remains “editorially independent”. 1 Lewin has consistently managed to remain unbiased and objective in delivering their healthcare know-how. In the last 40 years, they have grown as a niche healthcare consulting firm that provides non-partisan data, research, and strategic thinking for their various clients.
Even though Lewin works in a wide variety of areas relating to healthcare, and the work they do on their various projects is significantly different from one another, they are committed to their mission of being honest and veracious in the work they do. A lot of their work involves federal and state clients, who use their reports for health program planning and other regulatory affairs. The legacy that Lewin has built as an organization, is unparalleled in their field of work, but also not free from the general concerns that exist in working in a dynamic field like healthcare.
Through their testimonials, it is clear that the clients of the Lewin Group highly value the culture of “accuracy, independence and objectivity” that Lewin unfailingly provides. When it comes to principles, The Lewin Group is steadfast on its policies of honest, creative, and evidence based work. They work very hard in providing only the highest quality, zero-defect work to their clients.
III. Organization Culture
The culture at Lewin is extremely collaborative and team oriented. Most of the projects are staffed with employees at every level in the organization based on their skills and also interests, and are all helping provide their clients with inventive and executable solutions. While there is diversity in background, everyone is strongly committed to Lewin’s core values of “objectivity, integrity, innovation, and dedication to client satisfaction”.
Lewin not only deliver value to the clients, but also to the larger community. They succeed in offering a stimulating work environment, with highly motivated people who possess a
wide range of skill sets, including quantitative and qualitative analysis, research, and program and policy consulting. They usually seek candidates who want to be challenged and work hard, who prioritize customer service and are committed to independence and excellence in their work. At The Lewin Group, they focus on empowering their employees to ask more questions, develop better solutions and help make the health care system greater than ever.
IV. Organization Structure
As a consulting firm working in various sectors, Lewin is responsible for delivering their excellence in multiple ways. The work with policy, legislation, and regulation that help shape the healthcare system on all levels of the government. Additionally, they also provide assistance in developing, planning, and executing programs and interventions. Some of their services in both of these areas include preparing for shocks in the system, measuring and improving health outcomes, budget planning, and creating ground breaking strategies to help their clients make the delivery of health care efficient and effective.
As mentioned before, even though the work Lewin does vary with every project, it is important to know that they have created a name for themselves in some key focus areas. Some of these areas that are listed on their website are –
• Comparative Effectiveness Research
• Health Reform Modeling
• Workforce Planning
• Medicare / Medicaid Program Integrity
• Aging and Disability Program Support
• Demonstrations & Evaluations
• Technical Assistance and Training
Lawrence S. Lewin in 1970 founded the organization in 1970 which in 1987 was acquired by ICF. The newly created organization, Lewin-ICF was bought out Value Health 1992, and 4 years later sold off to Quintiles Transnational Corp. In June of 2007, Ingenix, a health care information and research organization acquired The Lewin Group. Ingenix served as a wholly owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest health insurance companies in United States as well as a large firm in the global health sector. Following this, certain firewalls and rules were established for Lewin to maintain its editorially independent status and integrity.
The current CEO of the Lewin Group is Lisa Chimento. The specific workstreams are headed by Lisa Alecxih, Charlie Bruetman, Jennifer Edwards, Clifford Goodman, Paul Hogan, Michael Nestor, Yvonne Powell who all serve as Senior Vice Presidents. The organization is further divided in to Vice Presidents, Senior Consultants, Research Consultants, and Research Analysts. Lewin also provides each of its employees to be a part of the decision making process when it is trying to develop proposals for bidding for projects. They believe that each employee should have a say in the kind of work that is being done at the firm, and be able to share their insights and ideas. They have an annual review, but also periodic team related feedback making it an open and transparent culture I learnt that junior employees are also encouraged to provide feedback to their supervisors for improved communication and better collaboration. Even though there seems to be a traditionally hierarchical system in place, Lewin constantly strives to create a transparent culture that invites periodic cross over check ins for all the teams.
V. Problem Identification
One of the main problems that is being faced by the organization comes from the volatility of the healthcare industry faces. The government is currently reinventing its healthcare strategy, which affects the work at Lewin. Lewin’s biggest client is the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In an environment like that it becomes extremely uncertain for consulting firms where their projects might either require closure or a complete overhaul. Since a lot of the work concerning federal and state healthcare as other health care organizations is driven by policy changes made by the Congress, this sort of uncertainty usually puts firms like Lewin one step back when it comes to delivering current dynamic strategic changes. One of the things that I learnt was that in a firm like Lewin, there is a lot of need and space for flexibility, as well as quick analytical thinking. While working on one project, there are times when the scope of the problem changes drastically. This often leads to a lot of superfluous work, as well as rethinking how one approaches the problem.
The Lewin Group does not advocate for any policy, program or legislation. However, a lot of emphasis is placed on making sure that teams are ready to face such kind of challenges, and that while working on a certain problem, every member on the team views the problem in a holistic way, accounting for all the issues that may arise in the future. In an environment, where collaboration and support are encouraged for employees at every step, it becomes easy to measure how a certain policy change would affect their work. The team at Lewin is made up over a diverse set of people that come from different backgrounds – both healthcare and non-healthcare related. Having an intermix of teams with these backgrounds makes it easier for Lewin to navigate through difficult situations. Being a private company, they’re also relatively more immune to shocks arising from changes in the industry. However, due to the majority of their work with federal and state clients, they were faced with the issue of whether the American Health Care Act would affect their line of work, and what would happen to the CMS and the projects they’re working on.
VI. Strategic Approach
The Lewin Group strives to differ from other healthcare consultancies. A big part of Lewin’s identity is commitment to excel in a niche industry. They realize that as health care and human services will forever be challenged by available resources, so they continue to look forward to to provide the best policy, research and consulting services to governments, associations and private companies for decades to come.
Knowing that the CMS is the largest client for Lewin, and that they’re working together on multi-million dollar projects, it is a bit of a challenge in the current political context to see what the next years would look like both for the CMS and Lewin. However, over the last few months, what became extremely important for Lewin was to prioritize the projects that needed utmost importance. According to Lewin, it is integral for them to insulate themselves of the administrative changes and continue to focus on what they’re doing.
In order to ensure that clients have access to quality services, the Lewin Group focuses on making sure that there is a continuous excellence in consulting services being provided to clients and that there is seamless coordination among the teams and the federal and state clients. The fact that they are a non-partisan organization inherently holds them accountable to providing a more efficient and effective strategy for their clients.
The Lewin Group believes that the way to achieve maximum client satisfaction is to adhere to a standard that is universally accepted, so as to keep their values grounded. To be able to deliver unbiased and objective research and analyses, it is important to have your core mission, vision, and values embodied in a structure that is considered the universal benchmark. It reinforces The Lewin Group’s group belief in maintain a strong culture of non-partisanship while also disseminating information that is pertinent, and impactful. To be able to certified by the ISO, holds them responsible for steering away. When it comes to making complex healthcare decisions or supporting analyses for such decisions, it is important that a firm reiterates its belief in guiding principles that protect them from outside changes. To do so, The Lewin Group has been certified to the ISO 9001:2008 standard for quality management systems. With this, the Lewin Group is far better positioned to meet the demands and challenges of the healthcare industry, be thorough in their research, use data driven methodologies and evidence based research to provide knowledge and consistently improve their processes to improve client satisfaction.
Translating policy to practice is the main goal for The Lewin Group. Approaching their projects with non-partisanship and clarity, along with objectivity can be hard to do when in a space where not only are things constantly changing, but our compassion is also fluctuating. To be able to execute reports for clients that have such political influence, can be a daunting task. However, Lewin, with its commitment to quality and objectivity sets itself apart from other consultancies who tend to lose their unbiased stand due to private interests.
VII. Policy Context
With the current republican bill doing the rounds, in the last 6 months there was definitely some concerns over the role of the CMS. This directly impacted the work done by Lewin, however, recently with the bill not being successful, there has been some hope that there won’t be any short term changes to the work done by Lewin. The environment around Lewin has been largely positive, knowing that the CMS is still expanding its projects, and would continue to do so unless the next piece of legislation suggests any changes to the work that they do. Although, since the largest chunk of Lewin’s clients are federal or state governments, policy scenarios do tend to affect them more than any other healthcare consultancy with a different client mix. The CMS and the CMS Innovation Center for now have their work cut out, which means that there is some stability going forward in what Lewin does, and none of their current projects have been affected. However, they have ramped up their work to make sure they achieve their project deadlines, and can get good work out to their clients.
VIII. Stakeholder Analysis
The main stakeholders for Lewin include associations, Federal/State/Local Governments, Foundations, Hospitals, Health Systems, Providers, Payers, Insurers, Pharmaceutical companies. Lewin helps these clients with data analysis, developing and implementing new programs, researching complex health and human services, succeeding in different markets, and with regulatory and administrative support. Throughout their engagement with clients, they have been lauded for their thoughtful and continued guidance, delivering critical analyses, and professionalism. They have recently been tapped by the CMS to play a key role in their largest ever initiative to transform and improve the delivery of and payment for primary care in America. These sort of projects explain the importance of an organization such as Lewin who, while not being active participants, are constantly evolving and influencing policy from the sidelines.
IX. Finances and Funding
Since Lewin focuses mainly on client facing roles across a different set of clients, their funding is usually on a project to project basis. They operate as a private company, and make over $25-50 million per year. Lewin has a vast set of clients and recently they have been expanding to newer markets. Lewin enjoys being a pioneer in the consulting when dealing with federal and state health. This gives them competitive edge over their rivals, because their funding is never curbed. Despite the fact that there are always significant changes to the healthcare scenario, the work that Lewin does doesn’t not become irrelevant, and their expert guidance is always needed.
X. Monitoring & Evaluation
Everyone at Lewin strives to be goal oriented and results driven. In order to quantify their success, Lewin uses different measurements for their projects. One of the ways they ensure quality and objectivity at work is to have weekly team meetings, where they go over deadlines and the status and health of their projects. Every month they tend to have larger meetings where all the teams can provide feedback to each other about the work that is being done and if there is any scope for innovation going forward. As a consultancy, their main feedback comes from the clients. Lewin has a very culture of meeting client needs, and all the teams tend to make sure that every week client feedback is taken into account and best practices are adhered to. Their idea of success is largely defined through their ability to meet their mission and adhere to the values. Overall, successful performance is carefully monitored internally and externally.11
XI. Challenges & Constraints
Some of the problems that the organization faces are more internal than external. Due to their large impact on the health care industry, some of the times the employees are extremely overworked trying to meet project deadlines which makes work life balance difficult. In a consultancy, it is known that people tend to work long hours and usually over weekends. This creates an environment that doesn’t foster a positive company culture which leads to higher attrition rates. A lot of the times people’s skills are not matched to the projects they’re working on, which could be a good thing, but in a lot of cases with the senior staff it becomes a point of contention. A lot of the times, because everyone is working such long hours and on different projects, the collaborative nature of Lewin’s approach to consulting takes a hit. Even though it lacks hierarchy in structure, the office is built in such a way that not everyone knows each other – this can be potentially harmful in diluting the ethics and culture that Lewin strives so hard to maintain.
XII. Future
With many changes in the healthcare system, there are some uncertainties that the organization faces. With the new administration in place, many things with healthcare are changing. Whether the ACA will be repealed changes the landscape and strategy that Lewin will employ. There is a possibility that it might affect the projects that they have in the pipeline, and especially the work that they do with CMS. There is also a possibility, that their work might be obsolete if all policies surrounding healthcare services are changed. Since Lewin is a subsidiary of other healthcare companies, it is also entirely possible that there are changes in management and administration arising from the new government, that could impact the work that Lewin does. However, it is important to note that being an independent organization who have been extremely adept in their work for the last 50 years, these are also changes that Lewin could withstand and capitalize for more opportunities.
References
1. About Us; retrieved from http://www.lewin.com/whylewin.html
2. Expertise; retrieved from http://www.lewin.com/expertise.html