- A reflection and update after the first few months as Haffty Consulting

By: David LaFontaine, Partner
David brings over two decades of experience listening to and understanding the needs of health systems that run on the MEDITECH EHR and delivering services and solutions tailored to those needs. 

Since David, Shelly and I launched the firm in mid-April, we have spent a significant portion of most days reconnecting with friends, business associates, former colleagues, clients, and, of course, new prospective clients. Excited and eager to spread the word about our company, our plans, our mission/vision/values, and our services, we have been busy engaging and educating as many interested parties as possible. As you might imagine, we initially fielded a lot of “tell us about what you are doing / about your company” type questions. Recently, with several months now behind us, many conversations now tend to start with some version of the question… “How is it going so far?”.

We still have a lot of work left to do around awareness and educating the market about Haffty Consulting.  However, with overwhelmingly positive support and encouragement from the MEDITECH community, we felt it was time to start to answer the question “How is it going?” with this broader forum and share some of our early highlights.

Most of the initial days post-launch found us heads down, focused on outreach and networking, building awareness of our presence, our brand, and our differentiators. Of course, we built our plan around, and were hopeful for, a marketplace that welcomed the focus and prior leadership experience of Haffty Consulting. But I don’t think we quite expected the degree of encouragement we received from former colleagues, clients, business associates, MEDITECH, and many other vendor partners. We certainly will remember all the thoughtful comments, kind gestures, and meaningful offers afforded us during this period – and will look to pay them forward down the road!

Looking back on our progress to date, here are some highlights we are proud to share at this time:

• Built an impressive talent pool comprised of top MEDITECH-focused consultants. We have deep ties with an extraordinary team of senior consultants who either have joined us or are positioned to in the near future. We feel confident this talent will be a strong differentiator as we build our company and client base. 

• Joined MUSE as a commercial member immediately upon our launch, attended MUSE Inspire in Denver as an exhibitor, and are becoming an active part of the MEDITECH and MUSE communities.

• Secured our initial clients and have begun actively delivering services on numerous projects!  (Note:  We will be excited to provide additional details in the future but want to give the necessary time to allow for demonstrable outcomes and success to develop.) 

• Forged strong networking relationships and alliances with respected and aligned vendors and MEDITECH partners.

• Developed a healthy and growing pipeline of future business opportunities, stratified across our various targeted services.

While we are pleased with our progress to date (sincere and special thanks to our first clients – while we are holding off on public acknowledgement until a more appropriate time, we sincerely value your trust and partnership!), we know we have a lot of additional hard work ahead of us. Our plan is to stay focused, be consistent in our approach, embrace our core values, and stay on our mission centered around the accelerating the value of the MEDITECH EHR. We feel confident that if we can do those things, we will be able to build on our early successes and be positioned to share additional progress and achievements with this audience next quarter.

Until then, we welcome the opportunity for any MEDITECH customer to contact, we would love to discuss a future partnership. We offer top talent, proven experience, and leadership focused on fostering long-term relationships through responsiveness, exceptional delivery, service, and results.