Briefs

BY Dibya Sarkar

April 24, 2006, N.Y. county leads in adapting business intelligence tools to help public agencies manage Medicaid spending New York lawmakers passed legislation April 1 that will allow Chemung County to take the initial steps to establish its own Medicaid reform demonstration project.

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Salient�s Muni-Minder, a business intelligence tool, helped county and Blue Cross officials gain insight into their Medicaid spending.

If approved, the demonstration program could generate $12 million to $18 million in savings for the county, officials said.

For populous states like New York, which annually spends about $48 billion to cover Medicaid program costs, the counties� financial burden is daunting. Medicaid costs on average have been increasing at a double-digit rate since the late 1990s, said Stephen Acquario, executive director of the New York State Association of Counties (NYSAC), a nonprofit association representing 57 counties and New York City. Medicaid spending is also one of the primary reasons that taxes in New York, which are 72 percent higher than the national average, have escalated in the past decade, Acquario said.

Such numbers have some county financial planners scurrying to take control of the Medicaid program. Last year, Chemung County, N.Y., began using data-mining and analysis technology to gain control of its health care costs. Data mining has given financial officers and health care insurance administrators a tool for analyzing the county�s Medicaid billing records. Now they can more easily determine how the county spends Medicaid dollars, and they are better equipped to discover waste, fraud and abuse, which by some estimates accounts for as much as 30 percent of the state�s health care costs.

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