Firm Profile
The First Chesapeake Group, Inc. (FCG) was established in 1987 to provide consulting services to senior executives, lawyers, and government officials in the healthcare industry who are responsible for leading their organizations in today’s complex and changing environment.
In addition to our litigation support and expert witness services, FCG’s services encompass strategic planning, financial and operational planning and analysis, hospital replacement and expansion projects, information systems planning and management, program evaluation, and payment system analysis and design. The firm’s clients include hospitals, insurers, health care systems, managed care organizations, state healthcare agencies, and law firms.
A major FCG focus is strategic planning. This includes planning for major re-organizations, mergers, acquisitions, and turnarounds, as well as strategic planning for financial and information systems. The firm also does program planning in specific areas and has strong experience in teaching hospitals and graduate medical education. FCG works with boards of directors and executive leadership of healthcare organizations to formulate plans. FCG also performs detailed marketplace assessment, competitor analysis, and quantitative and qualitative reviews of the organization to create business and implementation plans.
As a second focus, FCG provides implementation services to achieve strategic change. These services include operations improvement, cost accounting, and cost reduction. FCG has extensive experience in analyzing organizational efficiency and effectiveness, benchmarking, setting operational and financial goals with the organization, and then helping achieve those goals. We have substantial successful experience using these skills in turnaround situations. FCG realizes the strategic importance of identifying the costs of health care services, and responding quickly to the local marketplace to improve the quality, access, and cost of health care.
FCG’s third emphasis is litigation support and expert witness services in the areas of antitrust and merger/acquisitions, cost and reimbursement litigation, contract and insurance projects, tax-exempt status challenges, certificate-of-need projects, managed care, and bankruptcy. Several of our consultants have qualified as witnesses before federal and state courts and state agencies. The services FCG provides for these types of cases include the analysis of provider, clinical or epidemiological costs; quantitative and comparative analyses of hospital efficiency; assistance to legal counsel in developing effective litigation strategies; and presentation of analytical findings and conclusions in expert reports, affidavits, exhibits, and testimony.
The firm also has considerable experience in evaluating and designing reimbursement systems and specialty service programs at both state and provider levels. FCG has experience with hospital and long term care payment issues as well as managed care contract pricing and negotiations.
The analytical nature of most of the firm’s work demands excellence in data acquisition and management, statistical analysis, competitor analysis, and industry analysis. The firm continuously improves its data and information management and analysis capabilities through hardware and software enhancements, and staff training. Not only does the firm maintain an electronic library of hard-to-access industry-wide data, FCG staff are familiar with many other national and state-level data sources. The combination of staff, technology, and information allows FCG to provide timely, accurate, and thorough analyses and results to our clients.
At FCG all the senior executives have more than 20 years experience in the healthcare industry in the provider, payor, and consultant environments and have earned doctoral degrees or multiple master’s degrees or are certified public accountants. They have worked at executive level management in the areas of finance, information systems, strategic planning, operations, and nursing. They also have substantial prior experience for national accounting and consulting companies.
FCG maintains its corporate offices in Annapolis, Maryland, 35 miles from Washington, D.C.