Pebblestone Consulting specializes in data analysis to support the health policy and market access goals for clients across the healthcare industry. We bring decades of experience in analyzing healthcare claims data, modeling the financial impacts of proposed policies and regulations, and developing data driven strategies to support clients in promoting payment adequacy and preserving patient access.

What We Do

We work directly life sciences companies, device manufacturers, hospitals and health systems, trade associations, investors, private equity and their consultants to support their business, market access and health policy goals. Our work includes but is not limited to:

• Quantifying the financial impacts of new proposed policies and regulations to identify potential winners and losers. This includes identifying policy alternatives that can be recommended to better promote payment adequacy and patient access
• Profiling patient populations that may benefit from new treatments or technologies, which includes mapping the patient journey of care and estimating total addressable market
• Developing payment rate calculators, budget impact models, and dashboards to support the sales teams marketing new technologies or products
• Performing cost-criterion analysis to support applications for New Technology Add-on Payment and Traditional Pass-Through
• Data analysis to support Medicare Severity-Diagnosis Related Group (MS-DRG) change requests
• Modeling ambulatory payment classification (APC) change requests which includes evaluating for two-time rule violations
• Calculating expected practice expense (PE) relative value-units (RVUs) for technologies and services based on selected inputs for clinical labor, supplies, equipment, work and indirects
• Using quarterly and monthly Medicare claims data to monitor billing patterns in the Medicare program. This includes tracking site of service trends for individual procedures, estimating total claims submitted and dollars paid for individual NTAPs by hospital, and monitoring the geometric mean cost and device offset being billed by hospitals to keep device manufacturers appraised of any billing changes that may threaten future payment adequacy
• Double checking CMS math to ensure that proposed and finalized Medicare payment rates are correct based on the methodology proposed (or finalized) by CMS
• Providing data analytic support for client advocacy efforts, which includes meeting with CMS and policy makers to walk through project findings, and writing comment letters (or individual sections of comment letters) for proposed regulations

Why Choose Pebblestone

Clients choose Pebblestone because of our strong combination of subject matter expertise and data savviness. We know how to read the Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Register, and sub-regulatory guidance to fully understand the health policy being modeled, and we stay current on best practices to use the right methodological approach and data. We start all projects by helping clients first identify the right framework and research questions to address their business, health policy, and market access needs. We then execute on the project quickly and accurately, and produce deliverables that clearly communicate the most important findings relevant from the project to support the client’s strategic next steps.

Our Team

Devin Stone, President and Founder

Photo Credit: Rebecca Stone, Venice Italy, September 2018 

Devin Stone founded Pebblestone Consulting in 2027 to focus on the data analytic needs of his clients. Prior to Pebblestone, Devin built the data analytics team at McDermott+ and was an Economist at the CMS Office of the Actuary where he was a co-lead author on the National Health Expenditure Projections and focused on high priority research questions related to the Affordable Care Act. Devin has twenty years of experience performing data analysis to support stakeholders across the healthcare industry.