Cost Control for Human Services and Government

The OA application platform is an ideal tool for cost containment strategies for government and health care organizations. OA assessment technology helps government and payor organizations do three things:

  1. Match clients and patients with cost appropriate care settings
  2. Assess organizations to make sure they are following the most cost-appropriate processes
  3. Use data warehousing and analytics for creative cost containment strategies

Case Studies

OA Facilitation of Level of Care Strategies for Cost Optimization

Case Study: The Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths(CANS) Instrument

Behavioral Health disorders are one of the five most costly categories of medical expenditure in the U.S. We spend as much on Behavioral Health as we do on Cancer and more than we do on Asthma*. The Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) instrument, developed by Dr. John Lyons of the University of Ottawa, is a powerful tool for data-driven decisions about appropriate services for children with behavioral health challenges. The CANS helps the practitioner do two critical things:

  1. Recommend a treatment modality that is appropriate for a child and is least likely to do harm to that child, and
  2. Recommend the most cost appropriate setting for that child

In its early years, the CANS was responsible for reducing the inpatient population served by a large state agency, its most expensive treatment modality, by 33 percent, from 6,000 to 4,000 children. This number of children in inpatient treatment declined all the way to 1,600. OA has worked closely with Dr. Lyons to efficiently transfer CANS automation technology to other organizations.

OA Data and Analytic Tools for Service Delivery Organization Cost Monitoring

Case Study: On Demand Bed Allocation for Health Care

Objective Arts has worked closely with a state government organization that contracts for in-patient treatment through agreements that match payment to estimated need. If this need is greater than the contract, the state must pay the provider a premium rate; if it is less than the need the state pays for unused bed capacity. Paying for unused beds means that taxpayers fund service that is never delivered.

Objective Arts Data Warehousing solutions transformed this procurement process. By providing this government entity with instant daily utilization data and the reporting tools to accurately estimate utilization on-demand, OA enabled this state government entity to save 4 million dollars annually in just one in-patient program. Total time to engineer the OA capacity utilization warehouse from patient intake records and realize these savings – 2 weeks.

This solution can be applied to any forward contract scenario where capacity must be bought based on imprecise estimation procedures. Instead of guessing why not let OA deliver the real data?

*Center for Financing, Access, and Cost Trends, AHRQ Household Component of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, 1996 and 2006