Boost Healthcare Consulting Has a Heart

Boost Healthcare Consulting Has a Heart

PHOTO COURTESY LIANA HANS

Liana Hans runs her company as one she’d like to work for, having never lost sight of her early days from startup to corporate.

Like many entrepreneurs, Liana Hans used her experience in the corporate world to help shape her vision of a different kind of workplace.

Raised in Los Gatos and a UC Davis alum, she interned after college with a health care casualty firm and was hired by a small 10-person startup in the same field. But though she enjoyed the contributions she was able to make to the growth of the firm as it expanded to 600 employees in her 14-year tenure, she also observed the common trajectory of startup to corporate.

“It became a different atmosphere,” Hans said. “We were not offered any equity in the company, and there was no flexibility in work hours.”

By this time, she had two young children, and traveling all over the country made it hard for her to spend the quality time with them she needed.

So she made the leap, left the company, and “took some time to explore my options.” She rented a cubicle in an Alameda office building and soon a former client, a small hospital, came knocking. By 2013, Boost Healthcare Consulting was up and running in Alameda.

Although the company’s work is difficult to explain briefly, Hans said this: “A hospital client may give us half a million insurance claims to review. Of those, we may well find that 1,500 have not been paid appropriately by the insurance companies.” In about two months, depending on the amount of research involved, Boost Healthcare Consulting will then provide detailed reports to the hospital about its findings, enabling the hospital to recover what is sometimes “millions of dollars,” Hans said.

Her company now employs 40 people, and Hans has used her own experiences to create a workplace that acknowledges the full lives of her employees. “I asked myself, ‘What would be the perfect day in a job?’” Hans said. She listed, among other things, shorter commutes, more time in the day with her children, and “coming to work in workout clothes.”

Boost Healthcare Consulting employees are offered flexible hours, a casual-dress atmosphere, weekly team lunches, and CrossFit memberships with workout time incorporated three times a week into the workday.

Hans doesn’t subscribe to the idea that a 14-hour workday is necessary for efficient, well-researched output. Yet, as the website states, “All of our team members are charged with bringing creativity, honesty, and intellectual rigor to their responsibilities.”

Hans has done almost no marketing, but the firm is still growing “30 to 50 percent a year,” she said. That growth feels comfortable to her. And she continues to be vested in the concept that a workplace can be a productive, profitable place, while acknowledging the contributions, and accommodating the lives, of the employees who make it that way.

For more information, visit Boost-HC.com.