As Partner Consulting joins the Pixel Health family of companies, President Barry O’Brien looks back on nearly 25 years of his company’s history.
The More Things Change…
Opportunity and Confusion. Those are the words I’d use to best describe the telecommunications industry that helped give birth to Partner Consulting back in 1998. The regulatory environment was going through monumental change, opening up new opportunities for hundreds of new providers who were introducing a myriad of new service options to customers. And much of those products left businesses, healthcare organizations, utility companies and even governmental agencies shaking their heads.
In addition to regulatory change, technology was rapidly advancing. The broadband and wireless market was exploding and confusion was running rampant. Who should I go with? Is cheaper necessarily better? Should I choose one from column “A” or two from column “B?” IT and Finance departments were deluged with proposals. We thought people needed a partner, a guide, or someone who could just provide an answer in a language they could understand.
We became the go-to partner that was there to analyze solutions, implement those that fit strategically into an organization’s business plan, and then manage them properly as needs evolved over time.
Productivity, cost savings, and top-quality customer service have become paramount in today’s consumer-driven environment and the way an organization communicates inside and outside their operation is critical to success. Most clients realize they must go through continuous digital transformation to remain competitive. Recently, my good friend Michael Feld (CEO of Pixel Health) put it this way in talking about today’s healthcare industry. “It’s a very specific term that means creating the environment or modifying the experiences that a patient has in dealing with a hospital. We must make it more like what Amazon and other very well-developed, very slick E-platform service providers do. To make healthcare do that, is an enormous task.”
And so as a new member of the Pixel Health family, this marriage couldn’t have come together at a better time. Whether it’s a new Unified Communications platform, improved Contact Center technology, or more effectively managing broadband and wireless costs, our services are more important than ever. There’s probably not an industry anywhere that’s more in need of communications improvements than healthcare. Our new sister company VertitechIT has documented it repeatedly in conducting their INFRAM infrastructure assessments with health systems across the country. Communication and Collaboration scores are typically lowest across all other domain categories, indicating the area where the most remediation is needed.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Back in 1998, opportunity and marketplace confusion gave birth to our business and we’d like to think that the explosion in new 21st century technology has only reinforced the thought that the partner you needed almost 25 years ago is the same partner here to help you today.