As the primary funding source for health care services provided to low-income adults and children, elderly, and disabled persons, Medi-Cal is responsible for providing the care and improving the overall health of approximately one out of every five Californians. With more than 6.6 million beneficiaries, no other Medicaid system in the nation covers as many people as Medi-Cal does.
This new solution will help place California among the nation's leaders in managing medical assistance programs, and support the state's goals of achieving comprehensive health care reform, delivering high quality health care in the most cost-effective settings, emphasizing prevention and early intervention, improving health care outcomes, and uncovering and preventing fraud and abuse.
The four-year, $44 million contract calls for Bull Services - the nation's leading Business Intelligence solution provider in the public sector Health and Human Services space - to provide the hardware, software, services, and consulting expertise for the Medi-Cal system.
The new California system, known as a data warehousing Management Information System/Decision Support System (MIS/DSS) business intelligence solution, will usher in a broad level of analytical capabilities for CDHS, enabling the agency to conduct sophisticated trend analyses and predictive modeling - all designed to reduce costs and improve health services.
For example:
- It will give CDHS analysts the ability to access and analyze huge volumes of data in minutes, and quickly link data from disparate databases to determine patterns, probabilities and trends within the Medi-Cal system. With this knowledge, the state can make more informed decisions about the quality, scope, and cost of health care, today and in the future.
- It will offer CDHS the capability to track and monitor an individual's care and cost across overlapping programs -- for example, those people who receive Medi-Cal benefits and food and cash assistance benefits.
- It will also provide DHS with the capability to conduct disease management studies, better control pharmaceutical costs, and analyze how law and policy changes will impact Medi-Cal costs.
- With the capability to rapidly link other Human Services data -- Women, Infants, & Children (WIC), for example -- California can use the new system to help address major health care issues, such as addressing and improving the problem of low birth-weight babies, in an integrated way.
Photo: Entrance to California Department of General Services, by Wayne Hanson