Albany County, N.Y., signed a contract with Salient Corp. to implement a performance management solution to manage Medicaid and help control waste, fraud and abuse. County officials will also use the solution to identify opportunities for cost and service efficiency within Medicaid.

Albany County is the 4th New York county, after Chemung, Onondaga and Monroe, to use the solution, and is one of 12 counties involved in the state's Medicaid Fraud Demonstration Program, a pilot program that gives participating county governments local control over identifying and investigating cases of fraud, abuse and waste among providers in the Medicaid program.

The Performance Management solution will provide Albany County administrators with real-time, interrogative access to transactional as well as select non-transactional program data, enabling them to immediately identify opportunities for cost savings, operations efficiency and even detect questionable activity. In addition, for the first time, Albany will have a complete view of activities of all of its providers so that the county can identify behavior patterns and work with the providers to improve quality of service while reducing costs. Albany County's annual Medicaid budget is currently projected for 2006 at more than $53 million.

"Albany County is implementing Salient's solution to help ease the significant burden of Medicaid on our taxpayers and to facilitate better management of the system for its recipients," said Albany County Executive Mike Breslin. "We expect this solution to give us complete visibility into how Medicaid dollars are spent, where services are being used, and how to maximize our investment in the program."
KW