April 5, 2018 – Portland, Maine – Over the course of three productive months, Stroudwater Associates, a leading national healthcare consulting firm, welcomed two consultants, promoted two consultants, and completed an employee stock ownership transaction.
New Consultants
Heidi Larson, MD, MBA, is a family physician with more than 20 years of clinical experience. Before joining Stroudwater as a Consultant, she worked with Massachusetts General Hospital, helping to establish a primary care clinic on Nantucket, and as medical director for population health at Eastern Maine Medical Center. Larson is passionate about leveraging the power of relationships to build strong foundations in primary care. She believes this investment is a crucial step in the successful transition to value-based reimbursement models, including MACRA/MIPS/APMs, and public-private payor partnerships such as CPC+. Building on team-based care design, Larson helps practices and organizations adopt standardized clinical protocols using strong data analytics and focused care management to improve clinical quality, reduce cost and utilization, and boost patient and provider experience. Refining these elements will help organizations as they take on more risk in Accountable Care Organizations, Medicare Advantage plans, and other value-based payment arrangements.
Larson is a graduate of the University of Vermont College of Medicine and earned her MBA at the Heller School for Social Policy at Brandeis University. She served five years as a captain in the US Army Medical Corps before completing her family medicine training at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine.
Cynthia Wicks, MBA, MHA, joined Stroudwater as a Principal. Wicks has more than three decades of healthcare industry experience within national managed care organizations, health insurance companies, ACOs, physician IPAs, and hospital systems. She is an expert in payor/provider relationships, negotiations and alliances, provider risk and incentive reimbursement models, and alignment of provider reimbursement models with benefit designs, incentives, metrics, and fund flow models for commercial, self-insured, Medicare Advantage, and managed Medicaid products. Before joining Stroudwater, Wicks founded cWc Healthcare Consultants, and held positions as president of Southcoast Physicians’ Network and ACO in Massachusetts and vice president of Healthcare Network Strategy at CDPHP in upstate New York.
Wicks earned her MBA from Rensselaer’s Hartford Graduate Center and her MHA from Duke University. She holds a BA in biology from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA.
Promotions
Lindsay Corcoran, MHA, was promoted to Senior Consultant. Corcoran focuses on supporting and sustaining healthcare access for rural communities through hospital operational improvement and affiliation strategies; she has assisted Rural and Community Hospitals and clinics across the country to improve operational and financial performance. Corcoran is a graduate of the University of Southern Maine and earned her MHA at Seton Hall University. She joined Stroudwater in 2013.
Ryan Sprinkle, JD, joined Stroudwater in 2014 and was promoted to Senior Consultant. Sprinkle works with healthcare organizations to develop performance improvement and turnaround strategies that position those organizations to achieve long-term financial stability and sustainable growth. Sprinkle graduated with a BS from The University of Alabama and earned his JD from The University of Alabama School of Law.
Employee Stock Ownership Plan
Stroudwater completed conversion to an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) at the end of 2017 in order to position the firm to invest more aggressively in helping clients and communities across the country, while giving every employee a ‘partnership’ stake. The new structure will serve as a differentiator in employee recruitment and retention, as well as capital planning.
Stroudwater joins nearly 7,000 businesses and 14.1 million employees nationwide in adopting the ESOP structure, in which company stock is transferred to a trust established for the benefit of employees. ESOPs are the most common form of employee ownership in the US, representing about 11 percent of the full-time national workforce.
About Stroudwater
Stroudwater Associates is a leading national healthcare consulting firm. We focus on strategic, operational, and financial opportunities where our perspective offers the highest value.
Now an employee-owned company, we’re proud of our 33-year partnership with Rural and Community Hospitals, community hospitals, healthcare systems, and large physician groups. Services include:
| Performance Improvement
· Operational Improvement & Restructuring · Provider Practice Operations Improvement · Revenue Cycle Solutions · Post-Acute Care Operations · Payor Contracting Advisory · Staffing & Productivity Improvement · Clinical Quality Improvement
|
Strategic Advisory
• Mergers, Affiliations & Partnerships • Strategic Planning • Population Health Strategies • Physician-Hospital Alignment • Strategic Facility Planning • Capital Planning & Access • Post-Acute Care Strategy
|
Founded in 1985, Stroudwater has offices in Portland (Maine), Nashville and Atlanta.