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About Us
Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Blue Cottage Consulting is an independent, woman-owned healthcare consulting firm specializing in visioning, strategy, operations, and facility planning (programming, design review, transition and activation planning).

Blue Cottage Consulting is different - we have vision, knowledge, experience, and a point of view. Our professionals have held executive and management positions at some of the best medical centers in the country. Most importantly, we seek projects and clients that want to transform healthcare.
 
Cottages are about relationships, respite, and reflection. Blue Cottage Consulting is about creating a space for our clients to think, dream, and truly see the ocean of possibilities that exist for any given project. We coach leaders to embrace the possibilities, balance real versus perceived risk, and articulate a bold strategic vision – in other words, Be Transformational.  We get to know you, we work alongside you, and we create an intimacy in our partnership that fosters honesty, challenge, and innovation. It is an exercise that brings out the best in you and your team so that together, we can discover breakthrough solutions with practical implementation, explore global concepts with local applicability, and clearly articulate what success looks like and how we are going to get there.
 
Our consulting professionals challenge the status quo by applying lean efficiency standards to reduce waste, achieve mind-blowing operational innovations, and create an environment where clinical teams can achieve their full potential. We combine robust analytic tools and performance-driven measurement metrics, with real-world experience and active listening techniques to allow both data and people to guide each project to its highest probability of success. Our capabilities come from graduate training in healthcare management, nursing, planning, and architecture, as well as certification and professional training in special skills such as lean operations, six sigma, and executive coaching.
 
We are Blue Cottage Consulting and we are working to transform healthcare one project at a time.
ABOUT US

Archive for the ‘First Impressions’ Category

First Impressions: New hire Meghan Schmansky reflects on her first week at Blue Cottage

Monday, October 3rd, 2011 by Meghan Schmansky

As I prepared for my first Blue Cottage team conference call on Monday morning, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Having spent my career in academic medical centers, the world of consulting and working remotely is new to me.

During the team call I learned more about the amazing opportunities at Blue Cottage. I was impressed by the ongoing engagements and the potential new engagements. I am looking forward to continuing to work with academic medical centers and the new prospect of working with community hospitals. The variety of the engagements were intriguing, from operational readiness planning and transition planning in large academic medical centers to strategy and operations in rural community hospitals. The diversity of the engagements at Blue Cottage speak to the depth and breadth of knowledge possessed by the team.

Most notably, I have been struck by the intelligence, humor, and excitement of my new co-workers. While interviewing at Blue Cottage, I had no doubt they were different than anywhere I had worked. The passion of the employees is magnetic. While they are located throughout the United States & Canada, they are none-the-less extremely well connected and synergized. Everyone brings something unique to the team and their backgrounds complement each other perfectly. I look forward to learning from them, collaborating with them, and certainly laughing a lot.

As I enter this new phase in my career, I am re-energized by the team at Blue Cottage and remember the reason I entered healthcare – to improve healthcare, ensure patients receive the best care possible and are delighted by their experience. At Blue Cottage, I look forward to transforming healthcare one project at a time.

Meghan Schmansky, MHSA, is a Healthcare Consultant at Blue Cottage Consulting.

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No suits. No problem. New Intern Shares First Impressions of Blue Cottage

Monday, August 1st, 2011 by Andrew Mychkovsky

Two weeks ago, I became the official intern of the Blue Cottage Consulting team. As a recent B.S. graduate from Grand Valley State University with an interest in health policy and management, it was the least I could do to repay such a tremendous learning experience. In the past, I have had the distinct privilege of interning with the federal government, a legal firm, and a healthcare foundation. However, this will be my greatest opportunity to date and I intend to take full advantage of it.

After only a few weeks at Blue Cottage Consulting, one thing is apparent - It is unlike any place I have ever worked, interviewed, or even researched before in my life. A consulting firm not headquartered in New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, or Chicago? They must be small and non-reputable. False.

Tell that to some of the largest medical centers around the nation who have already done business with them. Perhaps corporate America and traditional big business has got it all wrong. I say this with all due respect to the many of former classmates who decided to go that route, but please listen. If this independent, privately held, women-owned company can be so successful while still having Pilate’s balls scattered throughout the office, maybe it’s time for change? I know that particular sentiment has mixed reviews with a looming 2012 Presidential election.

However, it does leave you to wonder, if several distinguished consultants can come together, creating an elite level of management from top to bottom, should this be the 21st century business model to be followed? For sheer lack of experience, it would be inappropriate for me to say this for certain. But apparently it works for Blue Cottage and that’s all that matters. With a company staff of less than a dozen, it is nothing short of amazing that they consistently compete with the top, multi-national consulting firms.

Come prepared to work, but leave the three piece at home. Unless meeting with a client, your required standard of dress hails in comparison to your required standard of work ethic. This is not to say several fashion gurus do not exist around the office, but from a ideological perspective the latter is much more important. Blue Cottage is where work and company loyalty take precedent over Armani and Yves Saint-Laurent. With a “work hard, but still enjoy life while doing it” mentality, I am excited to see what the next year has in store.

P.S. - I will begin posting informational interview responses of the Blue Cottage team sometime in the near future. They will hopefully shed some more personal light on the amazing workers that make this company so great.

Andrew G. Mychkovsky is a Healthcare Consulting Intern at Blue Cottage Consulting.

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Newcomer Weighs in on Internal Visioning Session with ZingTrain

Friday, March 4th, 2011 by Anastasia Vogt

I have had the opportunity (the pleasure, actually) to be client-side as Blue Cottage led a two-day intensive visioning exercise back in the Summer for 2010. This was no small feat: The task the Blue Cottage team had before them was to engage more than one hundred community stakeholders, organizational management and thought leaders in a compressed timeframe and to guide a group through an analysis of the stakeholder feedback to develop a project vision. The outcome from the exercise was a project vision statement that was thoughtful, salient and helped the organization accurately define its preferred future. Even those who were skeptical of the value of the visioning work left the main workshop feeling excited about the vision for the project.

The experience of that two-day session is why I’ve chosen to work with Blue Cottage today. I was so inspired by the effectiveness of the team, and it is clear that they are a great team that does great work. So, when I learned they were hiring, I reached out right away.

It has come to pass that I’ve started here as a healthcare consultant at an exciting time of change and evolution for the company – right at the beginning of a “growth spurt.”  And to kick-off that change and figure out what we hope to grow into, the company undertook a visioning exercise of its own in mid-February, guided by Stas’ Kazmierski of ZingTrain and Ari Weinzweig of the Zingerman Group of Companies.

In an earlier posting, Juliet acknowledged that Visioning can be challenging work.  Any shift that demands that we mentally check our day-to-day occupations at the door and project a future that we might not have even contemplated yet as a group is a stretch task, to say the least. So why go through with it? Can’t organizations function without a clear vision?

Absolutely – and lots do, some with success, and others with disaster.

Visioning work not only helps organizations to articulate a preferred future for a project or organization, this work also helps to get supporters (internal and external) engaged to reaching your future state. At our visioning session, Ari made the point that it’s fine if the vision is in your head, but it’s a lot easier for other people to work towards it if it’s down on paper. What’s more, whether you’ve got a two or 20,000 member team, they need to understand the vision so they can work towards it. So, there’s tremendous value in getting something down on paper that everyone can follow along with.

If you can’t get to your vision realized without your team, getting their input is a critical step of the process.  Those organizations that take an open and consultative approach have much more success in getting their vision done more quickly because they bring all stakeholders to the table at the first instance – and that can even mean bringing folks in that you know will be opposed to your ideas. Engaging as many people as appropriate, even at the risk of hearing differing or conflicting points of view, is a healthy for creation process. Different viewpoints can help to create a more robust vision through challenging our assumptions and taking into consideration different experiences. It can also help to identify areas that are sensitive to some individuals or groups and allows for a process to manage issues early on in your transformation, giving you an opportunity to avoid opposition down the road when there’s no turning back.

I find visioning work to be a lot of fun. It’s a chance for teams to get together to do a little team building through creativity and helps to shake out all those bright ideas and innovations around a process or a project that we’re just too busy to develop thoughts around while we’re spinning away with our days.
As for our new direction, it’s exciting times for the Blue Cottage. We’ve got team expansion and new services to bring on-line, plus we’re expanding in new markets – I’m the first Canadian employee based out of Toronto, and we’re bringing a west coast consultant on in the Spring.

The most important thing I gleaned from the Visioning work was that the Blue Cottage team operates at a very high standard. While we have our sites on expansion and evolution of Blue Cottage Consulting , our priority remains providing exceptional services and products to our clients so they can in turn provide exceptional care to their patients.

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