How we helped Finnish Social and Health Care Authority Essote break new ground with customer-level costing for social care
About the collaboration
Essote, or the South Savo Social and Health Care Authority, is a social service and healthcare provider in Southern Savonia with about 3.700 employees and an operating cost of close to 400 million euros. Essote provides social, primary and secondary care services to seven municipalities.
LOGEX provides them with costing solutions and LOGEX Region, a comprehensive solution for performance management and service network management for integrated health and social care.
The challenge
To fully analyse the costs and outcomes of their services, Essote needed to gain more detailed insights into all care activities and costs, including primary and secondary care and social care. While patient-level costing in healthcare is already a settled practice in Essote and many organisations in Finland, there was no known precedent for social care customer-level costing. The structured data quality in social care information systems can also vary significantly.
Our capacity for knowledge management in social care needed to be developed, and there was no ready-made solution for accurate care activity costing.
Viljami Kaasalainen, Project Manager, Essote
The solution
Our financial costing team supported Essote in establishing care activities and cost calculations for social care that follow Finnish national guidelines where available. The project’s goal was to define, implement and validate the cost calculations of selected social care entities, but we eventually did the costing for all of social care. A major part of the project was transforming social services and activities into calculation objects, thus enabling customer-level cost calculations.
By supporting Essote in this challenge, LOGEX had the unique opportunity to spearhead this development nationally; some would even say universally. This is why we also cooperated with THL, the Finnish institute for health and welfare, to whom we have reported our findings and results. They are naturally interested to see how the Finnish national recording guidelines can be applied to support customer-level costing.
The project started off with a very clean slate, following the national definitions for social care from the very beginning. LOGEX monitored and promoted the implementation of the specifications with great attention to detail, which also resulted in positive feedback from THL on the project.
Viljami Kaasalainen, Project Manager, Essote
The impact
With a detailed view of the costs and activities of all social and health care, Essote has much-needed data to improve the impact of their integrated social and health care services. A major challenge is to contain the costs of services needed by an ageing population with complex needs. Providers like Essote need to understand their whole cost structure and analyse the use of services of customer segments with varied needs for both health and social care, not only through the lens of primary care, secondary or social care separately. Essote is now able to utilise the new customer-level costing information in the LOGEX Region integrated social and health care analytics solution, thus enabling data-driven decisions and the analysis of their effects not just on separate functions in the region, but so too on the region and its population as a whole.
Viljami had the following to say about the impact: “We also found it very useful to have strong assistance in mapping the activities of our organisation. Although the various analyses were mainly done for the project, we also gained valuable observations and insights into various areas for improvement in our operations. In addition, the project management, communication and cooperation were commendable. Compared to the baseline, our social care costing has improved considerably, which enables us to perform knowledge management in a completely new way.”
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