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Dressed down in a light blue button down shirt and khakis, Robert Culbert, CHS President greets me with energy and enthusiasm I didn't expect considering it's the end of day 3 of the HIMSS '09 convention. He sits down across the table from me, in an oversized chair, in the hotel lobby café. His voice is horse, betraying how much talking is done at conventions, but his smile is genuine and I feel like he sincerely is glad to meet and talk with me.
Q: CHS has had a successful beginning, what do you attribute to your success?
Our commitment to listening to the client's needs, crafting a proposal that offers the best approach and building a sense of trust with their senior management team helps us to win business.
Q: Why do clients like working with CHS?
One of the best parts of what we do is working as a team to offer clients the benefit of our collective years of experience, showing a commitment to earning their trust and demonstrating a willingness to work hard and go the extra mile on their behalf.
Q: What specific work can CHS consultants complete?
We can help clients develop a strategy for purchasing and implementing a new system. We can help clients who have an EMR implementation under way with expediting the roll out. We can also help them with Revenue Cycle Assessments and improvement projects to ensure that they maximize reimbursement for current work while they are implementing the clinical systems.
We are more than a technology consulting firm and more clients look to us as a strategic advisor or an experienced management consulting firm. We offer strategic planning, experienced interim management staffing, physician compensation planning for groups choosing to acquire or employ physicians, as well as the project management and system implementation and roll out.
Q: Does anyone ever complain about the travel, for instance, when waiting for a storm to clear out of Boston or a snow delay in Chicago?
No one complains. I still travel to client sites, this past winter when I traveled to Louisville, Kentucky I arrived to the area being covered in 2 inches of ice and even more snow. The next day we awoke to more snow and a state of emergency that guaranteed an extra day in Louisville. Not a huge inconvenience since we had our laptops and cell phones, but I do understand the challenges that travel can provide. I can't tell you how much I appreciate the staff's efforts to get to and from our clients during the winter making it to the clients on time and working to let the clients know they can depend on us.
Q: What role does the CHS management team play? What about your role as President?
Having a core management team to ensure we take good care of our employees and clients is critical in order to continue our growth plans and create career paths for our employees now and in the future. As for me, I have two bosses: I report to the client and the employee.
Q: You've worked for some prestigious companies and healthcare organizations, what made you strike out on your own?
I had 20 years of hard work and building relationships within the healthcare industry before striking out on my own. I have had ups and downs during the course of my career and my hope for CHS was to use what I had learned from my successes and failures to make it a rewarding and fun place to work and succeed. In building the CHS team, the employees share in that same goal and use their past experience to work together as a team to do an excellent job taking care of our clients, showing them that we care, we're different and we can be trusted.
Q: I hear you are a big sports fan, not just of the Boston Red Sox, but of all the Boston sports teams. What similarities do you see between the teams you watch and CHS?
When talking about my sports teams, I remind people that my daughter and I had waited our whole lives for our first World Series and for me that was 41 years. I sat through many 2-14 Patriots seasons before finally getting to see my first Super Bowl victory and there was 22 years between turns as the Celtics played for the NBA championship. I'm a loyal fan. My first Red Sox World Series Championship was an extremely proud moment to cherish. There was no guarantee that there would be a second championship. The Red Sox, however, learned from what they did well, learned from their mistakes, tweaked the roster to improve the team and worked hard to earn their second World Series that year. At CHS, in many respects, we are in search of our second World Series. We've reached major milestones, but there is still so much more opportunity.
Q: Will CHS have to adjust to achieve their second World Series with today's volatile stock market?
There is no better CFO in the world to have on our side than Jim Akimchuk. With his help, from the beginning, we established rules which are tremendously helpful to have in place during these rocky times.
- We agreed that we should avoid investors and venture capitalists at all costs.
- We agreed that we should avoid borrowing money at all costs. If we didn't earn it, we shouldn't spend it.
- We agreed that if we ran the company well, we could concentrate on doing good business, with our only focus being on taking good care of our clients and our employees.
Rest assured, we have no investors that can divert us from doing good business, we have no debt to put additional pressures on how we conduct business and we have done a good job of managing expenses as we have grown. I share these details because I am proud to say that we are financially strong and are in the best positions we could possibly be to weather the current down turn.
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