Highlights
Specializes in research for health-care organizations; the average study surveys 2,000 pages of literature and requires 100-plus interviews, and captures ten to 20 business or clinical practices.
Publishes 50 major studies and 3,000 customized research briefs a year.
Unlike other consulting firms, it focuses on helping clients think through broad trends in an entire industry’s structure and direction.
The Advisory Board Company is the lucrative hybrid of a think tank and a publisher. Founded in 1979 with the ambitious purpose of answering any question for any company in any industry, ABC counted half of the Fortune 500 as member companies (or clients) by 1993. Since then the firm has narrowed its scope; it now provides best practice research and analysis for the health-care industry. It started offering shorter and more frequent publications, eventually putting them online. And it created H-Works, a workforce that collaborates with hospitals and health systems to improve performance through the application of ABC research. In late 2001, the firm went public. Approximately 2,500 hospitals, health systems, pharmaceutical and biotech companies, health-care insurers, and medical device companies are members.