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Continuant Healthcare Solutions (CHS) is one of Continuant’s most recent projects, created after merging with Fidelus and PPS. The goal of CHS is to assist healthcare providers in many ways, from developing websites and marketing strategies, to handling billing and credentialing. It combines the service model Continuant has finely tuned over 30 years with the healthcare expertise of our partners.
That’s why I went to Kimberly Evans, executive director of PPS (and now CHS), to give me some real-world examples of CHS in action. Over the course of 7 years, she’s got her fair share of stories to tell.
Submitted for the approval of Continuant’s customers, I give you: The Tales of CHS!
Kimberly told me this story about one of her first sales. 
Seven years ago, a woman came to PPS on a mission to start an orthopedics practice. Simple enough on the surface, but there’s a lot more that goes into opening a practice than simply choosing a discipline. Building a website, handling bills and credentials, and marketing the practice is work that most up-and-coming healthcare entrepreneurs need plenty of help with.
Nevertheless, she was determined. To show this, she hung her hat on a street corner, trusting that everything would work out.
That was the beginning of a fruitful 7-year relationship. This orthopedic practice didn’t stay on one street, expanding to 12 practices in 4 locations. Our heroine is even starting her own ambulatory surgery practice.
Her relationship with Kimberly has lasted all these years, and it’s relationships like this that make the difference.
Kimberly told me this story about a practice with very, very big plans.
In the early days of COVID, a behavioral health practice opened its doors in Texas. The founder had a vision: he wanted to be the Uber of Behavioral Health, operating across all fifty states. He came to CHS ready to build an empire overnight.
CHS told him to slow down.
Start with Texas, then Oklahoma, then another, and another. It's the kind of advice that's easy to give but hard to hear, and our would-be empire builder didn't love hearing it. He left to find a consultant who would make his dreams a reality.
He found one. That consultant looked at his dream — his practice that would stretch from sea to shining sea — and quoted him four million dollars.
Soon enough, he came back. CHS's numbers for Texas had been realistic from the start, and realistic was all we really needed. Despite this humble beginning, this practice today operates in 18 states.
The founder's built the practice around his employees first and tailors his marketing to each new state as he enters it. In an industry notorious for burnout, he's managed to keep his counselors from walking out the door.
An empire, as it turns out, isn’t built in a day.
Not long ago, a practice hired CHS for one thing and one thing only: credentialing. The manager had everything else handled. He was sharp, organized, and on top of his operation.
He didn't need a partner. He needed a task done.
But over the course of the work, Kimberly's team kept answering his questions. Credentialling questions, of course, but also anything else that came up. The kind of guidance that, from most firms, comes with an invoice attached.
Eventually the manager said it out loud: it's amazing how much consulting you've given me for free. And he offered to pay for it.
CHS turned him down. Instead of writing up a bill for advice he hadn't asked for, they pointed him toward a billing consultant who could help with his next step.
It's a small story, but it's a microcosm for the whole philosophy: CHS will actually talk to you, even when there's no line item for it.
Though these three practices have different stories, they demonstrate what CHS does in broad terms.
We offer a genuine spread of services — websites, marketing, billing, credentialing, expansion strategy — under one roof. Different departments, yes, but one phone number, one relationship, and one team that knows your practice. And unlike much of the industry, CHS hasn't outsourced that work to the other side of the world. It's US-based, and the people you talk to are the people doing the work.
The other half of the story is tailoring. CHS doesn't sell every client the same package, because every practice isn't the same. Practices in rural and urban areas have different needs where marketing and management are concerned, and the support they recieve changes to reflect that.
CHS specializes in helping small clients get off the ground, and most of them stay. They transition into long-term relationships built around growth and, eventually, the unglamorous-but-essential work of billing and credentialing. Some clients arrive decades deep: one practice had been operating for 45 years and came to CHS for help getting its billing and credentialing in order so the manager could finally retire.
As for competition — at this level, Kimberly will tell you it's close to nonexistent. There are firms that will set up a practice and then outsource every actual function, acting as the quarterback and nothing else. There are licensing-specific outfits and national credentialing shops that compete on individual services. But a US-based firm that does the full range and tailors it and picks up the phone? That's a short list.
Kimberly Evans has spent twenty years in healthcare and seven of them at what we now call CHS. When I asked her to put the company's biggest strength into a single sentence, she gave me two.
The first: "We will actually talk to you."
The second: "I won't sell you AC when the temperature is never higher than 70."
That's the through-line of every tale here. The woman who hung her hat on a street corner got a seven-year partnership, not a sales pitch. The Texas founder got told to slow down, and it built him an 18-state empire. The credentialing manager got pointed somewhere else entirely, free of charge. None of those are stories about a system executing a service. They're stories about a company paying attention.
In a world increasingly inundated with ultra-vague, cookie-cutter solutions — the kind of copy I opened this article promising to do better than — that kind of quality care and attention is rarer than it ought to be. Healthcare people understand the need for it, and that’s what makes our connection so strong.
These are the Tales of CHS.
To be continued.