Advisory Board
Advisory Board is a health care research and advisory firm based in Washington, District of Columbia, in the United States. Described in the batch record as a firm whose syndicated research and Daily Briefing serve hospital executives nationwide, it works on a membership model: health care organizations join, receive research and analysis produced centrally, and use that work to inform decisions they would otherwise have to research on their own. That model, sometimes called syndicated research, is the reason Advisory Board belongs in a directory of news and information agencies as well as in directories of consultancies. Its reports, briefs and daily coverage are distributed to thousands of member organizations, are quoted in health care trade and general news coverage, and function for many hospital and health system leaders as a regular source of information about their own industry.
Location and identity
The firm is headquartered in Washington, D.C., the city where it was founded and where its best-known predecessor company, The Advisory Board Company, was long based. Its website is advisory.com. For most of its history the organization operated as The Advisory Board Company, a publicly traded firm listed on Nasdaq under the symbol ABCO after its initial public offering in 2001. Following a major corporate split announced in 2017, the health care business passed to Optum, the health services arm of UnitedHealth Group, while the education business was sold separately. The name in current use, Advisory Board, is the shortened form under which the health care research operation continues inside Optum, with health care described by the company as its singular focus.
Founding in 1979
Advisory Board's own history records that David Bradley founded a research company in 1979 with five employees, working out of his mother's condominium in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. Bradley was 26 years old at the time, according to accounts of the founding. The original business, initially known as the Research Council of Washington, had an deliberately broad mission, described by the company as answering any question for any company for any industry. In other words, it began as a general-purpose research service that clients could task with unfamiliar problems, rather than as a specialist health care firm. That generalist origin matters because the membership research model it developed — pooling the cost of studying a problem across many organizations facing the same problem — was later applied, with considerable success, to hospitals and health systems.
Turn toward financial services and health care
Two turns in the 1980s defined the company's direction. In 1983, the newly named Advisory Board Company focused on financial services research. Then, in 1986, Bradley turned his attention to health care and created a membership program called the Health Care Advisory Board. The company itself dates its enduring commitment to health care from 1986, and health care eventually displaced the other early lines of work entirely. By 1990, according to its published history, the company had 150 employees and 500 members, and was publishing approximately 15 major reports and large numbers of research briefs each year. The pattern was set early: a growing central research staff, a membership measured in the hundreds and then the thousands, and a publishing output of major studies supplemented by shorter briefs on narrower questions.
Growth of the membership model in the 1990s
During the 1990s the firm both deepened its health care work and spun off the part of the business that did not fit it. In 1994 it created its first clinical research program, the Cardiology Roundtable, which provided best practices for cardiac programs; the company notes that it continues to research cardiovascular best practices today, under the Cardiovascular Roundtable name. In 1997 the firm spun off its corporate membership group to form an independent company called the Corporate Executive Board, later known as CEB and later still a subsidiary of Gartner. That spin-off separated the general corporate research business from the health care and education work that remained. In the same period, Advisory Board's membership base grew to more than 1,500 health care organizations, and it launched its first consulting offerings, adding implementation help alongside published research.
Public company years
The Advisory Board Company went public in 2001. By 2002, the company records, its membership network had grown to more than 2,100 health care organizations and it had about 500 employees, and it began offering leadership development training to address what it described as health care's leadership gap. A consulting arm launched around 2000, known as H*Works, offered best-practice implementation support. Over the following years the public company combined research, technology and consulting for health care organizations and, through its education division, for colleges and universities. Profiles from that period describe a firm working with more than 4,500 partner organizations, offering members hundreds of research deliverables a year, custom research studies spanning the health care ecosystem, events including summits and roundtables, and access to internal experts who could present findings or lead workshops for member organizations.
Research, briefings and the Daily Briefing
The core product has remained research that members can use without commissioning a study from scratch. The firm's method, as it describes it, is to find best practices across its network of member organizations, test them through disciplined, unbiased research, and distill them into practical guidance on the priorities members share. Alongside major reports sit shorter briefs and a daily briefing service aimed at hospital and health system executives — the Daily Briefing named in this directory's record for the firm. Daily and periodic publishing of that kind is what makes a research membership resemble a news service for its readers: subscribers come to rely on a regular flow of summarized developments, data and interpretation in their field, produced by a central staff and syndicated to every member at once, rather than on material each organization gathers for itself.
The 2017 split and the Optum acquisition
The public company's history ended with a two-part transaction announced in August 2017 and valued in total at about 2.58 billion dollars. UnitedHealth Group's Optum agreed to acquire Advisory Board's health care business for an estimated 1.3 billion dollars, including the assumption of debt, while private equity firm Vista Equity Partners agreed to acquire the education business, known as EAB and including the Royall & Company division, for 1.55 billion dollars. EAB, which served more than 1,200 educational institutions, was to operate as a stand-alone business. At the time of the announcement the health care business served more than 4,400 health care organizations, and executives on both sides said the combination would pair Advisory Board's research with Optum's data analytics resources and operational experience. Optum's leadership also stressed preserving the objectivity and credibility of Advisory Board's research. The transactions were expected to close by the end of 2017 or in early 2018, after shareholder and regulatory approval, and the health care deal was finalized in November 2017 after shareholders approved it.
Advisory Board inside Optum
Inside Optum, Advisory Board continued as a distinct research brand rather than disappearing into its parent. The company's own account of its history emphasizes continuity: more than four decades after the founding, it says, the commitment to addressing difficult questions with unbiased, disciplined research has not changed, even though the organization itself has changed a great deal. Founder David Bradley, who sold his ownership stake around the time of the public offering, went on to a separate career as a media proprietor as owner of Atlantic Media, but the research firm he founded retained the membership model he built. Health care, once one line of business among several, became the whole of the firm's work.
Who uses its work
Advisory Board's audience is institutional rather than general. Its members and readers are hospitals, health systems and other health care organizations, and within them the executives, planners and clinical leaders responsible for strategy, operations and service lines such as cardiovascular care. Its research is also a secondary source for the wider world: health care journalists, analysts and policymakers cite Advisory Board findings when they need an account of how hospitals are responding to payment changes, workforce pressures, technology adoption or shifts in patient demand. Because the same research reaches thousands of organizations simultaneously, an Advisory Board report can shape the vocabulary an entire sector uses about a problem, which is a form of influence more often associated with a wire service or a major trade publication than with a consultancy.
Place in health care information
Advisory Board occupies a position between research publisher, news service and adviser. It is not a general news agency, and it does not sell its work to newspapers in the manner of a traditional syndicate. Instead it syndicates research — studies, briefs, daily briefing material and expert access — to a large membership of health care organizations from a headquarters in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1979 as a five-person general research company, refocused on health care from 1986, public from 2001 and part of Optum since the 2017 split, it remains one of the most widely cited sources of analysis in United States health care, and its daily and periodic output continues to be treated by hospital executives nationwide as a standard briefing on their industry.
